It finally happened. Star Citizen has officially surpassed $1 billion in player funding. Well, I say ‘finally’, it actually crashed through the barrier a lot faster than I expected. I’ve kept a close eye on the funding tracker for Cloud Imperium Games’ hugely ambitious space MMO as it approached the big one-billy milestone, and with around $10 million to go last time I checked, I anticipated it hitting the target sometime in the next few weeks.
I suppose I was technically correct. But I didn’t take into account the fact that Star Citizen is playable for free until Wednesday, as part of its annual DefenseCon event where you can test out all its spaceships at zero cost. That means a lot more people will have been checking it. Some of those will undoubtedly have been seduced by all its big shiny spacecraft, which would explain the sudden spike in funding over the last few days.
This makes Star Citizen one of only two games known to have plus $1 billion budgets, the other being Monopoly Go—though most of that budget was spent on marketing. There are a few games rumoured to have +$1 billion budgets, however, like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Grand Theft Auto 6. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fortnite was up there too, given what it must have spent on all those brand crossovers.
If you’re curious how exactly Star Citizen raised so much money, its latest spaceship helps explain the story. Just before it hit the $1 billion mark, Cloud Imperium Game started sending out invites for select players to purchase the Anvil Odin, which the developer says “closes out the final remaining stretch goals established at the very beginning of the project’s journey.”
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What is the Anvil Odin? Well, it’s a 762 metre-long Battlecruiser armed with 20 vertical launch missiles, 15 manned turrets, 8 remote turrets, 42 point-defence turrets, and one massive laser beam. It also has its own hangar for docking smaller ships, as well as a canteen, its own hospital and an in-built tram system.
All of this can be yours for the not-so-low price of $5,000. Only, it can’t, because the Anvil Odin isn’t in the game yet. According to the ship’s description page on Star Citizens’ website, the ship is “being offered for the first time as a limited vehicle concept pledge”. Apparently, this means “the vehicle is in development, but is not yet ready to play in Star Citizen” arriving in a “later patch”.
It’s also worth stressing that you can’t just lay down five thousand smackeroos and get the Anvil Odin in return. To qualify for buying the ship, prospective purchasers must first be accepted into the Odin Founders Club, which involves writing an application to explain why you should be allowed in. Anyone who is accepted and pays their pledge will receive a “loaner vehicle”—the Aegis Idris-P, until the Anvil Odin leaves the shipyard.
Paying huge sums of money on a promise does kinda encapsulate the Star Citizen story up to this point, and is a large part of why the game has repeatedly been accused of being a scam. But while it’s taken a long time and used some interesting funding practices to get there, Star Citizen is very much playable these days and has been for years,
The big question, of course, is ‘when will Star Citizen be finished’? Its single-player component, Squadron 42, is theoretically due to launch in 2026, though Cloud Imperium Games cast doubt on this release window late last year. Star Citizen itself has a vaguely suggested endpoint of 2028. But there’s no real reason for Cloud Imperium to put a finish date on it so long as players keep throwing money at it, and even if they do settle on a 1.0 date, I expect it will become one of those forever games that just keeps getting added to.
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