Another year has passed for Cloud Imperium Games and its growing space simulator, Star Citizen, and it has been a big year.
At the end of 2024, when the game’s crowdfunding tally stopped a single million short of the previous record year, voices critical of the game argued that support for the project was finally weakening.
Turns out that assessment couldn’t have been further from the truth, as 2025 has been the biggest crowdfunding year ever for Star Citizen.
Backers provided the project with an absolutely massive $155 million in funding, up a whopping 33% year-on-year.
This handily beats 2023’s tally, which was the previous record at $117 million.
At the moment of this writing, the crowdfunding total is at $929,263,673, closing in on one billion. It’s certainly fair to expect that such a massive amount will be passed in 2026.
The number of registered accounts has also just passed 6.2 million, and it’s at 6,200,394 as of now. That being said, we know that not all are paying customers.
Some are alt accounts, while others are simply created to enjoy the “Free Fly” periods in which the game is available for free without requiring a purchase for a limited time.
2025’s success is likely the effect of the radical change in targets and development focus for the year, with Cloud Imperium Games targeting playability, stability, and polish, on top of adding content, instead of trying to introduce as many new features as possible.
While the game is still in alpha and the ride has not been perfectly smooth, that effort has been largely successful, culminating with version Alpha 4.5, which introduced the much-awaited engineering, following version Alpha 4.4, which came with the third star system, Nyx.
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a PC exclusive, crowdfunded project directed by Chris Roberts, whom you may know for creating classics like the Wing Commander series. It’s a multiplayer sandbox space simulator that has been in development for over a decade and in alpha for several years.
While the features of version 1.0, which would mark the official release, have been announced, a date or window for said release has not been shared.
A single-player campaign titled Squadron 42 is also in active development with a 2026 release window, starring an exceptional cast of famous actors, including Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and more.
Since the project 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.
