Star Citizen Hits $1B Funding as Squadron 42 Nears Completion – Exclusive

Cloud Imperium Games reached a stunning financial milestone on Sunday, May 24, as its sprawling space epic Star Citizen crossed $1 billion in lifetime funding , and still no official release date for the full commercial launch is in sight. For a title that originally aimed to debut in 2014, hitting that figure after 14 years of development is nothing short of extraordinary.

The project traces back to 2012, when legendary Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts co-founded Cloud Imperium Games with his wife, Sandi Roberts. Rather than seek backing from a traditional publisher or private investors, the fledgling studio turned directly to gamers. Chris built a prototype, Sandi orchestrated a crowdfunding campaign, and the result was a crashed website and $6.2 million raised from an eager player base eager to see the vision come to life.

Since then, Cloud Imperium has maintained an unusually open development process. Weekly livestreams, detailed blog posts, regular roadmap updates, and early access to an evolving alpha build have kept the community engaged for over a decade. The studio insists that every dollar of that $1 billion has been funneled back into development and operations for both Star Citizen and its companion project, Squadron 42.

“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 is so big that it’s something you don’t get in any 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.”

Sandi Roberts credits the community as the driving force behind the game’s longevity. “We did a lot of AMA Reddits in the beginning, and a lot of forums, and they voted on things,” she said. “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.” She noted that fans organize over 300 Bar Citizen meetups each year around the world, with one recent event in Asia drawing a couple thousand attendees.

Cloud Imperium Games now ranks among the largest independent game developers globally, with more than 1,000 employees across studios in Manchester, Austin, Frankfurt, and Montreal. But not all that effort is tied to the still-unfinished Star Citizen. The team has simultaneously poured resources into Squadron 42, a single-player cinematic space epic boasting a cast that includes Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, Ben Mendelsohn, and Henry Cavill. Described as a “narrative-driven space epic,” it places players at the center of a carefully crafted story brought to life through full performance capture and blockbuster-scale production.

When it comes to Squadron 42, however, Cloud Imperium shifts from its trademark transparency to a more traditional veil of secrecy. “Squadron is a little different, because we are developing that more traditionally, where that’s behind closed doors,” Chris Roberts explained. “A lot of the game systems and the technology is in ‘Star Citizen.’ 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.”

Roberts aims to deliver the same “seamlessness of existing in the universe” that defines Star Citizen, but with a heightened level of fidelity and detail. And fans won’t have to wait much longer. “We’re in the closing stages,” Roberts said. “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. It feels pretty epic.”

No release date has been set for Squadron 42, but Sandi Roberts confirmed the team is “imminently” closer to launch. “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,” she said. “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.”