It appears the pledge counter has reached the $800m milestone. It should only be $798m because of the missing the $2m but we won’t worry about that, no one else does.
Here’s the rest of the story though. I’ve used end of March 2025. Technically you could say they have raised over $1b but since they returned $4.8m to investors by way of dividend and I’ve deducted that from the capital raise, so the receipts side of the business is only actually $995m.
Total expenditure so far is around $924m.
920 employees. lol.
Just amazing when you hear about so many people doing so little. How often do the even come out with new ship .jpgs today anyway?
The biggest draw for the mega whales (once they realized the game was never coming out proper like) was to make endless spreadsheets , graphs , charts, and little animations showing off their vast JPEG holdings , and to use that to lord it over the poor at every chance they get on forums and discords around the solar system
I find it kind of fascinating. I think it’s kind of like a gacha game and people are willing to keep spending money. In gacha games the more you spend, the more you actively ruin the actual gameplay for yourself because it all becomes trivial but you’re in the eco-system now and invested (insert sunk cost reference here). I guess it’s a different neuron response to actually “playing” a videogame and I figure that’s why the game itself doesn’t matter so much to whales and that’s such a perfect fit for Star Citizen. Even the gacha element is irrelevant really. If you are a mega-whale you aren’t getting excited by the lottery mechanic because you’re just going to keep spending until you get the shiny new toy. Star Citizen has you covered and saves you time by just making you straight up pay up for the new toy.
Normally the whales will swim off for other shores when there isn’t that large population creating a community for them to be a part of while having all the available toys etc. I’m not really sure how the community is for Star Citizen.
2023 Financials have been posted. Calders did not exercise their option, in fact, they loaned CIG another 10 million
calders pulling a true believer and dumping more money into starship jpegs is lol
Having a look through and it’s interesting that they went from an £8m profit in 2022 to £8m loss in 2023.
I know this will be of topical interest. They were already at an average of 854 employees in 2023 for just the UK group. So probably 900+ at the year end. Add in the ~200 US employees in 2023 and you hit 1100 for 2023, which as I suspected is way in excess of the 900 in my estimate. Salaries nearly doubled…
such a niche product and whatever mainstream buzz is may have once had has completely evaporated.
What’s sad is that most of their early backers have all grown up and definitely don’t have time to play this game anymore anyway
Cost of sales rose by £16m but salaries rose by £22m. Administration rose by £8m.
Summary. They increased sales by £3.5m. They got an extra £5m in tax credits. So we are up £8.5m.
Salaries increased by £22m. Admin expenses were up from £2m to £10m. They therefore reduced other cost of sales by £5.5m but more likely, things included in Admin this year, were in cost of sales last year.
This puts cost total up £22m + £8m- £5.5m = £24.5m increased costs. £24.5m less the increase in revenue of £8.5 = £16m swing from a £8m profit to £8m loss.
The main reason the profit has tanked so bad is of course salaries.
since they acquired 100% of Turbulent we get a new entry by way of Canada tax credits.
We have a new disclosure here. Erin’s salary got a nice little 10% raise.
ongoing disclosure that earns them a qualified opinion from the auditors. £30m to £45m that has many assumptions and estimates, but it’s still a liability that should be included and isn’t.
I did not know that Turbulent had 200 employees.
These employee counts were of the most interest to me. Absolutely incredible numbers for their output.
Have to wonder if anyone in this company has heard of “The Mythical Man-Month”.
Remember how the Calders money was purely for marketing of Squadron 42? That Calders money is listed as ~$58m and you can’t really continue that story if you are already down to ~$30m in “cash” in 2023. If they are burning through ~$30m in cash in excess of receipts, the capital raise of ~$10m and loan of £10m is nearly there for 2025 but also we are only 1/3rd through 2025 so far soooo.
You can just outsource your bullshit now. Here’s my five bullet points of things I achieved this reporting period. I’m pretty sure some of these have appeared in actual CIG reports.
1. Leveraged procedural modularity to optimize emergent gameplay loops.
2. Iteratively refined the interactive feedback layer for dynamic user immersion.
3. Integrated cross-functional asset pipelines to streamline narrative scalability.
4. Applied real-time heuristic tuning to enhance systemic balance across core mechanics.
5. Developed a synergistic framework for adaptive engagement across diverse player archetypes.
oh shit is going down haha
The game was never supposed to be done before backers had time to have enough grandchildren to crew their capital ships
Everyone is conveniently forgetting many things that PC Gamer negligently left out:
CIG is making TWO games, not just one
The 12+ year timespan includes the time (and money) it takes to BUILD A STUDIO FROM SCRATCH. A studio that has a hard time holding onto staff because they’re in such high-demand.
The time it takes to build MULTIPLE game engines FROM SCRATCH.
CIG might have started with Cryengine, but what exists now, StarEngine, StarCloth, etc. are NOTHING like what they started with 12 years ago.
This is a PLAYABLE alpha. Chris Roberts is doing a number of firsts with SC: the first game of this scale, fidelity, immersion, with NO LOADING SCREENS. The first game that’s PLAYABLE while being developed.
You can argue the merits of whether it was a good idea or not to make it a playable game during development, but regardless, it’s what they decided to do and it has a SEVERE effect on the development time.
this person thinks that constant staff turnover is a good thing
If you’re having to build multiple game engines from scratch to complete a game, you have likely really fucked up.
they, in no way, shape, or form, made their game engine from scratch. they’re using a cryengine fork.
you don’t take an omelet that an omelet vendor sells you, rearrange the parts and add something, and then say you made an omelet from scratch.
Duke nukem forever is listed as the game with the longest development time, at 14y 44d. At what date can we consider that record broken? Somewhere 2026 I guess?
If CIG are running it as a scam then they aren’t doing particularly well because the monthly cost to the player decreases the longer they take to finish the game
it can’t be a scam because it’s taking too long! haha get owned haters
A Commando trying to sell his 100k+ account on the gray market (11 JAVELINS, 26 POLARISES, and more…)
Back in 2014 I first discovered Star Citizen, was very impressed with its potential and made my first LTI pledge for a Reclaimer concept. In 2015 I founded the Vanduul Conquerors organization in Star Citizen and later acquired my first Javelin. I also created this reddit account for trading ships around that time.
Over the years on weekends I worked hard in recruiting, training members, as well as investing in the game and obtaining as many Javelins as possible. It’s a combination of luck and my timing diligence that I was able to gather this many Javelins, Polarises and other ships in one account for the purpose of my organization.
Time flies and suddenly it has been more than a decade! my life priority inevitably changed. Now I would like to see other individuals or organizations to take over this account and realize its full potential.
lol at just taking a 25% loss on 100k overall like its nbd
just lol.
let alone assuming that someone will buy your 68k of spaceships that barely work
It’s a combination of luck and my timing diligence that I was able to gather this many Javelins
lucky you
I love that ‘spent hundreds on virtual spaceships’ is always replaced by acquired or obtained. Words that might suggest it involved actual work or whatever.
CIG has made acquiring the big ships a “game” by only selling them in limited amounts and at specific times, it’s one of their more predatory marketing schemes.
Move the jpeg factory to America, chris
My favourite will always be the discovery of stolen artwork , and the absolute Sherlock Holmes level of investigative work that went into roasting cig over it
I miss coming here for those first couple of years and laughing my ass off every day. No game scam kickstarter has ever been as entertaining as this colossal disaster. Surely most everyone has gotten a refund or died by now but when this thread had momentum, holy shit.
I think my favourite era would have to be the Major Tom dancey cat commando videos.
Squadron 42
Good news everyone
Sq42 is scheduled for 2026 release !
Squadron 42 is progressing well towards next year release.
As a reminder we’re around 1 month shy of 2 years since Squadron 42 was removed from the store with the directly quoted reason from Zyloh being
Squadron 42 has been removed from the store at its current price but will return at a later time. This change is not meant to signify anything other than an expected price change.
There is no room to read anything into this except that they took it down to change the price. Since obviously it doesn’t take 2 years to decide on a price, the only interpretation is that this is a representative of CIG blatantly lying. To what end I have no idea.
It’s surely some legal fuckery but you don’t dodge it by stating the dumbest possible reason for a store removal that lasts 2 years.
Pisscat
The are many features of Star Citizen engineering that are completely counter-intuitive, have very complex abstract methods of problem solving limitations that arise in standard game technology and these solutions are very different to the way things are ‘normally’ done. CIG have had staff hires in the past who could not adapt to these major differences, who moved on. A good place to start is by asking ‘What problem were they trying to solve’? The main problem they have always tried to solve s how to make systems and tools that can work at scales never even dreamt of in other games. If you know the limitations of other game engines and tools in these areas affecting scale it becomes fascinating to see their out of the box, even off the wall solutions. CIG aren’t just making ‘a game’ with a known engine and tools, they are designing tools that can produce more, faster than any other known.
Every time a Star Citizen dev talks, it sounds like a TED Talk inside a black hole. Why? Because the tech is too advanced. No really; they tried to explain it, but us normies didn’t understand the 47 layers of spaghetti-engineering involved. So now they just say “Trust us, it’s basically magic. Chris said so.”
Also, if you’re wondering why NPCs behave like confused Roombas. Well duh, that’s intentional. They’re still running on CryEngine 3 duct-taped to a dream. “Fixing old code” is for lesser games. Star Citizen doesn’t fix things, it transcends them.
My favourite thing is when they say that once the engine and the pipelines are done, CIG will make content faster than any other developer ever has. Not only have we waited over a decade now, but CIG has never, ever, not once, shown that they are able to push out lots of playable content quickly.
Even when CIG is not working on engine stuff and new features, things still go at a snail’s pace. They spent so long just iterating on that one guy wearing seven jackets. They spent months talking about one single bartender. Even if a genie snapped his fingers and gave them a magical game engine that could do everything they need it to do, CIG would still make content extremely slowly because the company is so appallingly run.
Most games aren’t on their 3rd iteration of ingame assets before they have complete design doc.
Given I’ve been away for a little while I think I’ve got more context for the Pisscat thing. It’s not just that CIG/RSI have glommed on to the dumbest whales in the gamerverse, that wouldn’t be enough to explain Star Citizen or their reaction to this decade-spanning saga. No, but the dumbest conspiracy whales in the gamerverse would do it. It’s a conspiracy that no one else gets it. It’s a conspiracy by the whole games industry to take down Chris Roberts. It’s a conspiracy which only makes sense as one when you assign it agency and ignorance of the “truth”.
Hello, I’m an accidental whale
So I have always spend small increments on the backing of this project “better than buying skins elsewhere” well, today it dawned on me. This month it’s ten years since I first backed. And I’ve just lost faith it will deliver what I hoped it would. And that for the longest time I’m annoyed with the lackluster communication.
I have officially requested a refund on all my pledges as I’m an EU citizen. I got the usual response “30 days refund period is not applicable”
As the pledge is a pre-purchase on a product that wasn’t delivered still. And because of the misleading information and empty promises, I have the right to have my money returned. Because the transaction is incomplete.
I made my own WEARABLE Vanduul Mask!
This is the culmination of almost a month’s worth of work
It looks like it’s entirely made from dried jizz. The SC playerbase is so creative.
The sandals really tie the whole thing together.
i’ll do the dishes when we go back inside mom! just take the pictures please this is for my internet friends
How can that be so bad? It looks like it’s just slapped together as if it were a game made by CIG.
Chris Roberts accidentally naming his shamelessly Asian-coded alien race after a real city in China will never not be funny to me. I can’t not lol at it whenever it comes up. Motherfucker created an Everlasting Gobstopper of comedy.
I think he probably went “okay this is the race of mystic space asians, the ching chong” and xi’an is the least racist alternative they could brainstorm on short notice
I was replaying Oblivion when the first Star Citizen News came out.
Now I’m playing the Oblivion remake while they’re still making Star Citizen.
Its fascinating how some things just stick with you.
Once you recognize the genius of Star Citizen you will feel ashamed of your words and deeds
Someone told me that star citizen comes out tomorrow like 2 weeks ago, how’s the launch been?
Turns out everyone was wrong and this game is incredible.
