2024 has ended, which means that another year of crowdfunding has ended for Cloud Imperium Games’ space simulator Star Citizen.
Just before the end of 2024, the crowdfunding total for the game passed $774 million ($774,040,003 to be precise), meaning that Star Citizen fans pledged just over $116 million during the entirety of 2024.
While the game’s ongoing crowdfunding campaign did not manage to match the $117 million record achieved in 2023, it came just one million short.
This means that 2024 was the second-best year of crowdfunding ever for Star Citizen, as you can see in the chart below courtesy of the tracking website CCUgame. It beat the previous second-best year (2022) by approximately $3 million.
The game also enjoyed the best December of its crowdfunding history. Part of it is because this year the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo was partly in December. Yet, the biggest cause is likely the launch of update Alpha 4.0 and the introduction of the second Star System, Pyro.
While the experience has not been smooth for everyone (it’s still a “preview” version of 4.0), the introduction of the much-anticipated “server meshing” technology increased the number of players per server and improved performance across the board.
This created a wave of positive sentiment among many fans, which naturally resulted in higher spending.
On the other hand, 2024 was only the 5th best year for Star Citizen in terms of account registrations, with 485,547 accounts created during the year. The best year for this parameter was 2022 with 871,922 accounts created. The current total is 5,489,966.
Of course, not all these accounts represent paying users, as many register to enjoy the limited-time free-to-play period like the one hosted during IAE.
It’s fairly obvious that by now, a large percentage of users who are interested in Star Citizen have already registered, so it’d be difficult to achieve numbers similar to 2022 when the game enjoyed strong media coverage and reached a visibility peak.
As time passes, Cloud Imperium Games needs to rely more and more on funding from its existing backers (mainly through subscriptions and ship sales) or on converting people who previously registered but did not pledge into paying customers.
Creative Director Chris Roberts promised that development in 2025 will focus on playability, which may contribute to achieving that goal.
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a crowdfunded project directed by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame. It’s a multiplayer sandbox space simulator that has been in alpha for several years and that will be released exclusively for PC.
A few weeks ago, we got to see plenty of features and tech coming to the game, on top of the overall vision for version 1.0, which will be the full release of the game, albeit it doesn’t yet have a date.
A single-player campaign titled Squadron 42 is also in development, starring an exceptional cast of famous actors including Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and more. Recently we saw plenty of gameplay and learned that it’ll release in 2026.
Since the project has been in development for over a decade, you can also see how Squadron 42 evolved since its first reveals.
Full disclosure: the author of this article has backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign.
