Gustavo Sorola has been waiting more than ten years to explore the stars.
Along with millions of other hopefuls, 46-year-old Sorola gave money to help get the video game “Star Citizen” off the ground. By some accounts, it’s the most expensive video game in history. The multiplayer space exploration game has raised more than $716 million from more than 5.3 million backers. (For comparison, one of the most popular games of all time, “Grand Theft Auto V,” cost an estimated $265 million to develop and publish.)
But Sorola, an Austin resident who co-founded the production company Rooster Teeth, doesn’t think he’ll ever see an actual game. (Full disclosure: The author of this story worked at Rooster Teeth two years ago.)
Sorola has bought ships in “Star Citizen,” which are sold on the basis that they can be piloted in the game. But he doesn’t expect to ever use them. “I sure paid a lot of money for cool jpgs of spaceships that I’ll never get to fly around in,” he told The Barbed Wire in July.
Despite being the most successful crowdfunding project of all time, raising an unprecedented amount of money, “Star Citizen” still hasn’t been released after nearly thirteen years of development. Some of its backers have demanded refunds, while others have moved on. Some blame the project’s ambitious goals, claiming the game’s scope has gotten out of control. But money continues to roll in, while others hold out for the galactic game of their dreams. (Officials at Cloud Imperium Games did not respond to interview requests from The Barbed Wire about the development of “Star Citizen.”)
“Star Citizen,” according to gaming news site IGN, “is considered one of the most controversial projects in all video games,” adding, “Over the 12 years since its crowdfunding drive began, it’s been called many things, including a scam by those who wonder whether it will ever properly launch.”
But despite years of negative headlines, the project continues to raise millions from a dedicated fan base. And according to the developer’s own financial reports, they’re raising more cash than ever — pulling in a whopping $114 million in 2022, the latest year available in the company’s public financial records. (And an app that tracks the game’s pledges shows it hasn’t slowed down.)
“Star Citizen” was the brainchild of legendary developer Chris Roberts, who was famed for making the space combat franchise “Wing Commander.” Roberts is a jovial presence on stage, with an easy smile and an infectious enthusiasm for gaming. It’s not hard to see why so many have bought into his vision.
Development started in Austin almost thirteen years ago, during the crowdfunding craze, and Roberts hyped “Star Citizen” to the moon, promising a vast universe with “100 star systems” for players to explore. Its team pitched an immersive space simulation game with thousands of people flying ships and exploring planets together in a universe so vast that you could lose yourself inside it.
More Money, More Promises
The story of “Star Citizen” is one of ambition, of ever-increasing scope and expectations, and of the perils of too much freedom. It’s also a story of a passionate fan base who continue to fuel what they hope will be the most technologically advanced game ever made.
As the money has rolled in, the project has expanded.
Early on, “Star Citizen” split into two games: a multiplayer game called “Star Citizen” and a single player game known as “Squadron 42.” The latter enlisted big-name actors like Mark Hamill, Gillian Anderson, and Henry Cavill and, like “Star Citizen,” promised a new degree of high-end graphics and immersive gameplay.
“My youngest son was 10 (years) old when this started, he’s now 18 next month…and still no game. I have paid my mortgage off and retired.”
And while development has taken years — not uncommon in video games — there were promising signs of progress. In 2018, the development team put out an impressive-looking trailer for “Squadron 42.” At the time, it was reported that the game was expected to go into beta release in 2020.
But that never happened, and eventually Roberts’ company Cloud Imperium Games abandoned all public-facing timelines for both titles, saying that they weren’t accurately reflecting the work on either games.
Defenders of “Star Citizen” point to a series of limited content releases over the years, as proof that work is being done on the game. Dating back to 2013, Roberts’ company has released various playable features, starting with a viewer that lets players look at their ships, followed by a mode in 2014 where players could battle each other in their ships.
Today, there is an alpha — a very early, unfinished — version with a limited number of planets to explore. For around $45, you can buy a starter ship and fly around, but you’re playing in a small sandbox — a far cry from what was promised: a universe with dozens of star systems, each filled with explorable moons and planets. Meanwhile, the developer has still not given final release dates for either “Star Citizen” or “Squadron 42.”
Despite that, players are contributing more money to the project than ever before, including funders who have purchased bundles of in-game spaceships, some costing tens of thousands of dollars. The ships themselves are sleek, intricately detailed, and look like they’re ready to travel a cosmos that doesn’t really exist yet.
Still, those bundles continue to be profitable for the developer. In 2022, when Cloud Imperium reported bringing in $114 million, their revenues were up 32 percent from the previous year. Cloud Imperium wrote that the “vast majority” of said revenues were from “starter pack pledges granting access to the ‘Star Citizen’ alpha game, as well as spaceships and digital items immediately delivered and playable in the game.”
What’s more, an app that tracks “Star Citizen” pledges shows that Cloud Imperium raised even more money last year — $117 million — though that number hasn’t been officially confirmed through the company. In fact, in May of this year, the game brought in $25 million in new pledges, an increase of more than 28 percent compared to May of 2023, according to the app’s unverified count.
Would-be players have continued to support “Star Citizen” despite reports that, behind the scenes, things were a mess.
In 2019, when Roberts’ team had raised a cool $300 million, Forbes interviewed 20 former Cloud Imperium Games employees who called the development process “chaotic” and predicted that “Star Citizen” would never release.
In fact, former staffers accused Roberts of micro-managing his employees and getting hyper-focused on minor details of the game to the detriment of ever finishing — in one case, Roberts reportedly told a graphics engineer to spend months working only on the visual effects of the ship shields.
“As the money rolled in, what I consider to be some of (Roberts’) old bad habits popped up,” Mark Day, a producer on “Wing Commander IV” whose company was contracted to do work on “Star Citizen,” told Forbes. This is what insiders call “feature creep” — the excessive ongoing expansion or addition of new features in a product, impeding the overall progress.
“It had got out of hand, in my opinion,” Day told Forbes. “The promises being made — call it feature creep, call it whatever it is — now we can do this, now we can do that. I was shocked.”
As the ambitions of “Star Citizen” grew, the development operation expanded to more than 500 employees working in five offices around the world. But as much as the game raised, Roberts’ team was apparently spending money just as fast. Forbes reported that by the end of 2017, Roberts was down to a mere $14 million in the bank.
‘I’m Very Disappointed’
As the years passed, some backers have lost patience.
A review of Cloud Imperium’s page on the Better Business Bureau site shows several complaints about the game, with one accusing the developer of misleading its backers.
“Cloud Imperium continues to falsify and bait-and-switch under … flimsy arguments that they are in fact allowed to do whatever they want, even fundamentally change the style and purpose of the game that they sold AFTER collecting funds,” the complainant wrote.
Forbes reported that, in 2019, the Federal Trade Commission received 129 consumer complaints related to Cloud Imperium, and the requests for refunds reached as high as $24,000.
Since then, some frustrated backers have joined together on Reddit to help each other get refunds for the game. One user, “Dadskitchen,” posted that he’d given up all hope of seeing a game — and that was four years ago. “My oldest lad was 15 when I backed (the game), he’s now 23,” he wrote. “My youngest son was 10 (years) old when this started, he’s now 18 next month…and still no game. I have paid my mortgage off and retired.”
Earlier this year, another Reddit user “Vegan-Joe” wrote that, “for someone that spent 8k on the game, I’m very disappointed in the slow progress.” Neither “Dadskitchen” nor “Vegan-Joe” could be reached for further comment.
A former Cloud Imperium Games employee contacted by The Barbed Wire via email and whose work history was independently verified said that their time on the project was sometimes exhilarating, with a talented team striving toward an ambitious goal.
“There was a great feeling of ‘We’re in this together’ with the development team. We’d often go to dinners, hang out, play other video games at lunch together, go to the movies, etc,” the former employee said. “There was a constant feeling of collaboration.”
The former employee, who asked not to be identified out of fear of professional damage over speaking to the media, said he still believes in the project and called it one of the most ambitious games he’s ever worked on.
He called Roberts a “visionary” who was “involved in every facet of the game’s development, from the design, to production, to the scope, to the engineering.”
Still, he admitted that it was a massive undertaking.
As for when the game will ever be released, he called it “a very complex question.” He added, “I don’t think it will ever be released using the traditional retail method of ‘here is the final product.’ I think it’s a game that will just be iterated and expanded upon over time.”
As for “Squadron 42,” he was less positive.
“It was supposed to be released back when I was there, and that was close to a decade ago,” the former employee said.
Holding Out Hope
Others have more hope for an eventual release.
Morphologis, a gaming YouTuber who has closely followed the progress of Star Citizen, said he’s still been in communication with members of its development team.
In an interview, Morphologis — who didn’t want to use his real name, for professional reasons — told The Barbed Wire that the delay comes down to the game’s immense ambitions, which requires developing new technologies to bring it to reality.
“It’s extremely hard to make a game this detailed, without severely limiting the scope,” he said. “And they have no desire to limit the scope.”
But it’s also that ambitious scope that continues to attract investors.
“It seems like there’s no way they can pull it off,” Morphologis said. “But they’re trying. And I think that’s what keeps people interested in backing the project, because they have been trying to push the industry forward.”
“While the money’s still rolling in, there’s little incentive to speed things along.”
The fact that “Star Citizen” is crowdfunded, he said, means that the team can take as long as they want.
The developers are “not answering to a board of directors or a big publisher that wants to see it developed in a nice and tidy development cycle,” he said. “It’s kind of open to however long the game is supported and however long they feel is necessary to develop the game.”
Ultimately, he believes both “Squadron 42” and the more ambitious “Star Citizen” will be released in the next few years.
Morphologis says the team has prioritized finishing “Squadron 42” and he thinks an announcement may be coming in the near future. In October of last year, the company said the game was “feature complete” and had moved to the “polishing phase.”
As for “Star Citizen,” Morphologis thinks we’ll see a 1.0 release of the game in the next three to four years. But he’s expecting that the release’s scope will only be a fraction of the original promise. Compared to the 100 star systems that were initially trumpeted, he believes that the initial release will be more limited — to 5 or 10 star systems.
Currently, the game’s alpha build consists of fewer than ten planets to explore. After 13 years of development, that’s a far cry from the hype of 100 star systems — each filled with planets — in a vast, interconnected universe.
‘It’s Not Worth Guessing’
Game development takes a long time, but “Star Citizen” has already taken longer than most. While it hasn’t surpassed the record for longest development ever (that would be “Duke Nukem Forever,” which took more than 14 years), it’s starting to get close.
Like Morphologis, veteran gaming journalist Tom Phillips, who is editor-in-chief of Eurogamer, told The Barbed Wire that he also believes “Star Citizen” will eventually launch in a Version 1.0 form. “I think there’s too much resting on ‘Star Citizen’ one day getting to that 1.0 milestone for it not to happen at some point,” he said. But he didn’t venture a prediction as to when that might happen, saying that “it’s not worth guessing.”
“Creators will take as long as they want to make the things they want to make if they’re given the commercial leeway to do so,” Phillips said. “And while the money’s still rolling in, there’s little incentive to speed things along.”
And while some like Morphologis anticipate that we’ll see a game in the next few years, it’s also worth noting that the game’s development history is replete with promised deadlines and features that haven’t panned out.
Roberts himself addressed the issue in a letter to the game’s community earlier this year, promising that would-be players will see an updated alpha version this year — and that an eventual 1.0 release “twinkles on the horizon.”
“While we recognize that there is no definitive finish line in an online MMO, and that we will always be adding new features and content for many, many years to come, Star Citizen 1.0 is what we consider the features and content set to represent ‘commercial’ release,” Roberts wrote. “This means that the game is welcoming to new players, stable, and polished with enough gameplay and content to engage players continuously.”
For now, the money keeps coming in and development of “Star Citizen” and “Squadron 42” plods along. But after all these years, refund requests, complaints, and naysayers — there’s still a lingering question: At what point does “Star Citizen” become so ambitious that it can’t ever feasibly be made? Will the project eventually collapse under its own weight, as other video games have done in the past? And will hopeful players ever stop handing over their hard-earned cash?
In February, Roberts’ company announced that it had eliminated “a small number of positions.” The gaming news website Video Games Chronicle reported that some of the departures “are likely linked to Cloud Imperium wanting staff to relocate to a new office in Manchester, England,” which is where Roberts grew up. But layoffs are rarely a hopeful sign.
Back in 2012, I interviewed Roberts about the initial crowdfunding success of the game. At the time, he was enthusiastic about having a direct relationship with his audience: “Early on, I’m reaching out and connecting with the audience and the community.” He called it both “invigorating” and “useful.”
“You’re getting direct feedback and interaction from them,” he said. “You’re sharing stuff that you’re working on, you’re throwing out some ideas to them, to see what their feedback is.”
At the time, “Star Citizen” had raised more than $7 million — a shadow of its current sum, but a huge total in the early days of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter.
“It’s pretty amazing,” Roberts said at the time. “We didn’t think we’d do that well.”
