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Cloud Imperium Games marked a major milestone Sunday (May 24) as the game developer’s open world massively multiplayer online space game “Star Citizen” has reached $1 billion in lifetime funding before formalizing a release date for its full commercial launch.
It’s an impressive benchmark for any title, but especially for a game 14 years in the making that was originally targeting a 2014 release.

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From Chris Roberts (the mastermind of the hit ’90s PC game “Wing Commander”), “Star Citizen” has been in the works since 2012, when Roberts co-founded Cloud Imperium Games alongside wife Sandi Roberts. The young studio decided to forgo traditional funding from a publisher or private backers, and instead reached out to the larger gamer community through a crowdfunding campaign.

Chris Roberts built a prototype for “Star Citizen,” and Sandi Roberts orchestrated a campaign that showed off the development. The end result was a quickly crashed website and $6.2 million raised by players eager to see the game come to fruition.

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Since then, Cloud Imperium has slowly but surely been developing “Star Citizen” in front of fans through weekly livestreams and blogs, regular roadmaps releases, and — most recently — early playable access for the continuously updated alpha build. And Cloud Imperium says that every dollar raised by the developer — which has now reached that above-mentioned $1-billion mark — has been reinvested directly into development and operations on “Star Citizen” and Cloud’s latest project, “Squadron 42.”

“I think that the goal that everybody is supporting is pretty ambitious and huge, but also a pretty exciting one,” Chris Roberts told Variety. “A lot of people want to spend time adventuring out in the virtual world of something that’s like ‘Star Citizen,’ and that’s really what’s helped get us to where we are, because the dream so big that it’s something that you don’t get in any other other game. It’s not something that would be able to be done under a traditional big game publisher funding it, or private equity. They usually wouldn’t have the time and the patience, but with what we’re doing, people just want to see the biggest, best world possible, and they love the idea of the dream. And as we’re going along and they see more of it, it reinforces itself, basically. I fully believe that we’ve still got a long time, even after we’ve got what we call 1.0 out, and we’re not considering an alpha anymore, that we’ll be adding and building on the universe and the world, and it will be a place for people to adventure together and meet up together and have fun together. Not too different than, say, ‘World of Warcraft,’ which has been going on for 20-plus years after it released.”

Sandi Roberts says the “community” aspect surrounding “Star Citizen” has been a driving force that’s kept interest going despite the long development cycle.
“We did a lot of AMA Reddits in the beginning, and a lot of forums, and they voted on things,” Sandi Roberts said. “And we did a lot of shows, showing the open development and the real nitty gritty of how things are made. It’s not the most exciting topic sometimes, because things don’t move fast in video games, but I think that’s been really exciting and interesting for the community, and we also involve them a lot. A lot of the developers, they go to these ‘Bar Citizens’ [meetups]. So we have 300-plus of those a year and those are events organized by the community, and they’re all over the world. I just came back from one in Asia that had a couple thousand people. It’s all set up by the fans. So I think that’s something that’s been really special with this game, that we have people who’ve just been with us a really long time. Sometimes, I get in and play with them. I’ve made quite a few friends around the world through the game.”

“Star Citizen” maker Cloud Imperium Games is among the largest indie game developers in the world with more than 1,000 employees across studios in Manchester, Austin, Frankfurt and Montreal, and cumulative revenue approaching $1 billion. But not all of that is in the name of still-unfinished “Star Citizen,” as Chris and Sandi Roberts’ teams have been simultaneously working on “Squadron 42,” an ambitious single-player game with a star-studded cast including Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, Ben Mendelsohn and Henry Cavill.
Per the most recent description for the project, “Squadron 42” is a “cinematic single-player game set in the same universe” as “Star Citizen.” In the “narrative-driven space epic” ‘Squadron 42,” players become a central character “experiencing a carefully crafted story brought to life through full performance capture and cinematic production on a blockbuster scale.”
It’s on the topic of “Squadron 42” development where Cloud Imperium becomes tight-lipped and the transparency the team is known for is swapped out for a classic veil of video game production secrecy.

“‘Squadron’ is a little different, because we are developing that more traditionally, where that’s behind the closed doors, but a lot of the game systems and the technology is in ‘Star Citizen,'” Chris Roberts said. “So ‘Star Citizen’ is a nice way that we can say, ‘OK, that works. That doesn’t work. Oh, this works under stress. This doesn’t work on a scale.’ And then ‘Squadron’ itself is a much more authored single-player story, as opposed to being multiplayer. Because it’s literally just an authored single-player story, the fidelity and the attention to detail to the story and the environments and the progress we do, it’s always going to be higher than it can be in ‘Star Citizen.’ ‘Star Citizen’ is wide and expansive, and you go to different star systems and planets, and so you can’t carefully craft every single second of the experience, but you can in ‘Squadron.’

Roberts’ goal is to bring the “seamlessness of existing in the universe” that his team has focused on creating in the multiplayer “Star Citizen” project to “Squadron 42.” And fans should see what he means sooner rather than later, as Roberts says the team is “in the closing stages” on the game.
“My pitch is, basically, you’re the star of this huge blockbuster event movie, and it seamlessly goes between the storytelling and the cinematic moments to you being in control and first person and pass it, moving through the story, and has a level of detail and scale and scope that you don’t normally see in a game,” Roberts said. “It feels pretty epic. I’m actually very excited for when people– because we’re right at the end now, we’re in the closing stages and it’s coming together really well. I’ve been very lucky as a creative because I’ve had the ability to take the time and have the funding to really do it. James Cameron had that when he was doing his ‘Avatars.’ This is sort of like my version of it in games where I’ve had the time; I’ve been able to spend the time to get the tech. And so the vision that’s being delivered is really my imagination, my vision from the beginning, and that’s not something you always get the chance to do. So I’m pretty grateful for that, and I’m also very excited for people on the outside to experience it.”

While no release date has been set for “Squadron,” Sandi Roberts confirms they are “imminently” closer to launch, and that Cloud Imperium is well aware the demand for more information is only increasing the longer they try to keep things under wraps.
“At the moment, the heat is being turned up for ‘Squadron.’ That’s a difficult thing to deal with, in terms of, we are so close to the community,” Sandi Roberts said. “And with all of these events that we do, it’s difficult. As we get imminently closer to launch — and I say that in game development language — it’s very hard to keep it under wraps. So the marketing campaign for ‘Squadron’ is quite different from ‘Star Citizen.’ It’s going to go for a broader audience. But I’m excited for the community to get on board, and they’re very keen to because they’ve been with us for so long on ‘Star Citizen,’ and they really feel like they’re part of it, which they are. So for them to sing from the rafters that ‘Squadron’ is launching, I think, is going to be an exciting moment.”

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