Star Citizen just saw the conclusion of another of its big events, Invictus Launch Week 2955, and as usual, it came with a big boost for the space simulator’s funding. Yet, this time around, it was the second-biggest ever.
Alongside the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo that usually happens in the fall, Invictus Launch Week is when Star Citizen fans get to fly the shiniest new ships and drop the big money for them.
This time around, the event, which ran between May 15 and May 27, earned Cloud Imperium Games a mindboggling $24.25 million, coming just shy of the previous record achieved at the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo in 2023 (about $24.25 million) and narrowly beating the $24.2 million for IAE 2024.
This is quite remarkable, as IAE is historically much more profitable compared to Invictus Launch Week.
If we go deeper into the data, we see some interesting elements, including the fact that this is the best Invictus Launch Week ever, earning 25% more than the previous best, the 2024 edition.
If we look at the funding earned per day (events have varying duration), it’s actually the best event ever for Star Citizen, with over $1.85 million earned on average every day. IAE 2023 was the previous record holder, but it earned “only” $1.75 million per day.
This is also the biggest month of May ever for the game’s funding, with over $28 million earned at the moment of this writing, beating the $25 million earned in May 2024.
The game is already far ahead (+37.2%) compared to the end of May 2024, and it enjoyed the best first 5 months of the year in terms of funding ever, by a very wide margin.
As a matter of fact, Star Citizen earned $61 million in the first five months of 2025, which is over half compared to its best full year ever (which is 2023, with $117 million, narrowly followed by 2024 with $116 million).
This certainly bodes well for the full year, as Star Citizen’s crowdfunding is usually pretty skewed in favor of the second half of the year.
Interestingly, with almost every big event, Star Citizen is hit by some controversy. Some is self-inflicted, with the Cloud Imperium Games often doing something that its passionate community considers a faux-pas, while some comes from certain areas of the gaming press, which usually bring up this or that “anonymous source” to attack the game and its developers.
Yet, with almost uncanny regularity, Star Citizen seems to continue chugging along relatively unbothered like a freight train that cannot be stopped, continuing to break records.
It appears quite obvious that this year’s focus on playability and content is paying dividends, as opposed to the haphazard addition of new features that often ended up destabilizing the experience. The fact that the highly anticipated Aegis Idris capital ship has also been released likely helped.
If you’re unfamiliar with Star Citizen, it’s a PC exclusive crowdfunded project directed by Chris Roberts, who you may know for his work on the beloved Wing Commander series in the days of early PC gaming. It’s a multiplayer sandbox space simulator that has been in development for over a decade and in alpha for several years.
In the meantime, the crowdfunding total continues to grow, and it recently passed $835 million. To be precise, it’s currently at $835,808,464. The game also has 5,720,319 registered users, albeit not all of them are paying customers. Many simply create an account to enjoy the occasional free-to-play periods like the one that just ended.
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.
