Surprisingly enough, the long-gestating space game has become even more active. According to Star Citizen’s creative director, Chris Roberts, Star Citizen’s DAU (Daily Active Users) has grown by more than 50% since December 2020, double the daily login traffic compared to last month, and a high number for its MAU (Monthly Active Users) although Roberts failed to specify a number. More importantly, Roberts revealed that CIG is confident that the game will “break 4 million total accounts, over 1 million unique logins” and “$500 million in lifetime revenue,” later this year. As of the time of writing, Star Citizen has raised more than $460 million. To put that into context, the most expensive video game ever made that’s out on the market, Cyberpunk 2077, which was in development for nearly a decade, cost CD Projekt RED $174 million. This is less than half of what CIG has raised and spent on Star Citizen and it’s still not coming out anytime soon. In fact, you could add the total development costs of the five most expensive video games and it still wouldn’t be enough to match Star Citizen’s expenditure. The most recent lengthy blog post by Roberts reveals a lot of new things about Star Citizen, but none that are worth getting particularly excited about. If it’s any consolation, Roberts did talk about Squadron 42, which is the cinematic single-player part of Star Citizen. Roberts claims that progress on Squadron 42 is “coming along nicely” but that it is still “not quite ready to pull the curtain back” on the game yet - a familiar statement for those who’ve followed Star Citizen for a while. At this point, Star Citizen will have been in development for over a decade. Usually, games that take this long to make and release are thrown into the garbage pile. For some reason, people are still willing to give CIG money. The most common sentiment among disheartened players is that CIG should have released Star Citizen years ago. While no one will deny how much work CIG has put into Star Citizen, the kind of progress that we’ve seen in the game in recent years feels a lot like something that CIG could have achieved even if Star Citizen was formally released to the public. Nearly $500 million later, Star Citizen remains a neat tech demo.
