Cloud Imperium Games boss Chris Roberts himself shared news about Star Citizen and its single-player component, Squadron 42.
Squadron 42, starring an exceptional cast of famous actors, including Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and more. was supposed to release in 2026.
It has now been moved to Q2 2027. The reason is common to many other games that aimed for a release this fall. The developers would rather not compete with Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto 6.
Roberts concedes in his “Letter from the Chairman” postthat GTA6 isn’t launching on PC, but the eyes of the whole industry will still be on it, making getting the word out about Squadron 42 and receiving coverage challenging.
On the other hand, Star Citizen is continuing to grow in terms of engagement. We hear that in the first half of 2026, the developers saw a 7% increase in average daily players and an 11% increase in monthly active players compared to last year.
Concurrent players have also peaked at 35,890, which is certainly flattering.
With the release of Alpha 4.10 and Siege of Orison, with its specific flavor of instancing, the team also successfully deployed what they define as the first use case of dynamic server meshing, which is at the foundation of what Star Citizen will need to progress to version 1.0.
“When instances are created, we monitor server load and when we hit a specified maximum load ratio we will spin up additional servers to manage the additional instances dynamically. The Networking team calls this Quasi Dynamic Server Meshing (QDSM) because we are not yet subdividing territories in the persistent universe but it is the first case of us spinning up (and down) servers dynamically based on load and required us to create a lot of the services that you need for full dynamic meshing in the persistent universe.”
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a PC exclusive, crowdfunded project directed by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame. It’s a multiplayer sandbox space simulator that has been in development for over a decade and in alpha for several years.
The crowdfunding total for the game recently passed one billion dollars, and it’s currently sitting at $1,040,363,496. The game currently has 6,685,884 registered accounts, but we know that not all are paying customers.
Some are alt accounts, while others are simply created to enjoy the “Free Fly” periods that fairly often let non-backers enjoy the game at no cost.
It’s notable that Star Citizen’s funding tally for 2025 has beaten all records from previous years by a large margin.
Since Squadron 42 has been in development for over a decade, you can see how Squadron 42 has evolved since its first reveal.
Full disclosure: the author of this article has backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign.
