ALL THE LATEST NEWS ABOUT THE BUSINESS OF PC GAMES

News

Star Citizen broke its funding record with $47.7m raised in 2019

Star Citizen broke its funding record with $47.7m raised in 2019

Wildly ambitious crowdfunded space title Star Citizen raised a whopping $47.7m in 2019.

That's according to Polygon, which reports that this is a 26 per cent increase on the $39m the game brought in during 2018. That's also on top of the $46m the project attracted in private investment to assist with the single-player Squadron 42 aspect of the game, which features Hollywood talent Mark Hamill (pictured). 

By the end of 2019, Star Citizen had raised at least $251m in funding to date.

The project started with a Kickstarter campaign back in 2012 with the game still not actually out in 2020. Its developers wanted to have a beta for Squadron 42 out this summer, but this has been pushed back three months and will now be rolled out between July and September.

The fact that the game is bringing in huge cash but also hasn't properly materialised yet resulted in 129 complaints to the US's Federal Trade Commission as of May 2019, with former staff painting the project as being mismanaged.


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.