While Star Citizen is still in alpha, and it’s going to be for quite a while longer, it already enjoys a lively esports scene, and it took the stage today following the second day of CitizenCon.
The Enter Atmosphere 2954 event organized by Atmo Esports was held at The Factory in Manchester, UK. The recording is available on YouTube.
The first competition of the day was the Ship Racing Exhibition, which saw some of the top space racers in the community compete over a series of 9 tracks that can be found in Star Citizen.
Ultimately, Playingfox took the racing trophy, with his consistency being rewarded throughout the pitched races that saw tight cornering and plenty of crashes.
The second event of the day was the Fight or Flight World Championship Finals, a duo team-based dogfighting competition.
The tournament was won by team Shadow Mosus, formed by Thefloormatt and Amogus. They won all of their matches with an overwhelming 2-0 score, which is certainly remarkable
Third place was taken by team Zap Leishen, formed by Gimic and Vittania, while the second-highest step of the podium was occupied by team Liberty’s Reapers EU, formed by Hybaa and Bobdoggle.
Each team came from the top of their respective regional championships.
The trophies were delivered to the winners directly by Chris Roberts, Creative Director of Star Citizen and CEO of Cloud Imperium Games, who mentioned that when he started working on the game, he did not expect to see an esports scene flourish in it.
“Part of what I love about Star Citizen is the discovery of what the game becomes and evolves with everyone that is playing it. A lot of the times, when we’re making the game and when we see the community do stuff we go “Oh my God, we didn’t think we could do it, we weren’t thinking about that. Let’s add to the game to make that more popular, that’s really cool.
When I was first making the game I thought it’d be like Freelancer, a bit more contained. Certainly wasn’t going to have fully realized planets and all that. That came along the way and opened up a lot more things. I think it’s amazing.”
He also added that the organizers should be proud of what they accomplished, as today’s event was bigger than the first couple of official CitizenCon events.
The next big Star Citizen esports event will be the Daymar Rally, a Paris-Dakar-inspired all-out rally on the sands of Crusader’s moon Daymar. It’s the event that kickstarted the esports scene in the game several years ago and definitely quite exciting to watch. It’ll happen on January 18, 2025.
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a crowdfunded multiplayer open-world sandbox space simulator that has been in development for several years. It’s directed by Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame.
Between yesterday and today at Citizencon, 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.
The game has just passed $731 million in crowdfunding ($731,076,240 at the moment of this writing) and counts 5,368,170 registered users. Of course, many of them aren’t paying customers, as they register accounts to enjoy Free Fly Events.
Besides its online persistent universe, Star Citizen will also have a single-player campaign named Squadron 42 starring an exceptional cast of famous actors including Mark Hamill, Henry Cavill, Gary Oldman, Liam Cunningham, Gillian Anderson, and more.
Just yesterday, we saw a large live gameplay demo, and we heard that it’ll release in 2026.
Full disclosure: the author of this article has backed Star Citizen’s crowdfunding campaign.
