Star Citizen Crowdfunding Hits Historic $1 Billion After 14 Years

Star Citizen was already the most-crowdfunded game in history when it launched into Early Access on November of 2017, having raised over $174 million USD from Kickstarter, which was well past its highest crowdfunding stretch goal of $65 million. Fast forward to today and Star Citizen has racked up just over $1 billion USD from combined crowdfunding and Early Access sales (including in-game content) after 14 years of nonstop development. That funding has resulted in continuous expansion for Star Citizen and also the development of a single-player spinoff called Squadron 42. The game is a historic milestone for crowdfunding and sci-fi games in general, and the ongoing expansion shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.


Star Citizen didn't get here without some pushback. Last year and on several other occasions, controversy sprang up relating to the sale of "Pay To Win" items like Flight Blades, which impact ship speed and handling. Cloud Imperium Games has been responsive to the criticism though, by also allowing Flight Blades to be earnable through in-game progression, but there is still a very real economy of money being exchanged for ships and other goodies within Star Citizen, including limited sales of a $5000 "Odin" ship which will eventually be craftable in the full 1.0 release, though details still remain scarce.

But if you're interested in Star Citizen or games like it, don't let that discourage you from trying it out. As we speak, the game is Free To Play until May 27th (as it was for a brief period during 2020), and past that point, the Citizen Starter Pack only costs $45 USD. The game also runs reasonably on modern hardware despite its graphics fidelity and scale, any modern multi-core CPU and GPU with 8GB of memory is more than enough to meet recommended specifications, so long as you have an SSD with 150 GB of free storage and at least 16GB of system RAM. The game's core appeal is how effectively it blends immersive sim aspects with FPS, space exploration, starship combat, and MMOs, If you've enjoyed recent titles like No Man's Sky, you should feel right at home in Star Citizen.