Star Citizen brings new updates noticeably slower, but collects more and more players and money

The boss of the sprawling space MMO Star Citizen has written a long letter to the community. There, founder and CEO Chris Roberts talks about the past year – and what we can hope for in the future.

What kind of game is this? Star Citizen is a double-edged sword:

This repeatedly caused criticism of the project.

Now boss Chris Roberts reported to the waiting community with a look back and ahead.

Pandemic slowed it down, but the numbers are growing

Roberts says in the letter: In his statement, Roberts reports on last year and the difficulties of the pandemic, which would have slowed down the development process to a certain extent.

While proud of the seamless transition to “work from home”, as the situation dragged on, it faced challenges: “When all employees are working from home, it becomes increasingly difficult to solve problems on the fly or receiving or giving feedback,” says Roberts. The number of meetings and video calls has also skyrocketed.

This was noticeable:

“Personally, I’ve felt the difference in our release cadence; it was taking us a little longer to get each patch out and it was getting harder to resolve or fix bugs.”

Therefore, in the future one looks more towards a hybrid model of office and home work.

This is what the numbers look like: Despite the slowdown, Star Citizen has seen positive developments, according to Roberts: “We’ve seen more people than ever flock to Star Citizen, buoyed by waves of goodwill and excitement from current players who have been inviting their friends to join in.” even complete novices would have found their way into the game.

According to Roberts, the rate of new players has more than doubled and since Alpha 3.17, over 2,000 new players are joining daily, according to Roberts.

According to Roberts, the number of daily active users has increased by 50% since December 2020. In addition, since then almost a million new accounts and more than half a million new players have been counted. The two millionth player just signed up this week.

“We’re on track to hit 4 million total accounts this year, have more than 1 million logins this year, and generate more than $500 million in lifetime revenue.”

Despite the positive numbers from Robert’s point of view, one must not forget that Star Citizen still has a lot of development work to do after many years – it is, says Roberts himself, still “on the way to beta”.

Roberts defends this, however, and describes SC as a game that combines many features in a size that no other game offers: “It’s a dogfighting space sim, a first-person shooter, a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game. Star Citizen is a space sim,” said Roberts.

New content on the way to “4.0”

What’s next? In his statement, Roberts also addresses many points that should come into play in the future on the way to “Alpha 4.0”.

As an example, he cites the new Persistent Entity Streaming system, which Roberts describes as a milestone that needs a lot of work. This ensures, for example, that items that you simply drop in the Star Citizen universe remain there – even after you have logged out and logged in again. For example, if you drop a weapon in the forest, you’ll still find it there days after logging out – unless someone else removed it.

According to Roberts, this technology is crucial for the game because it is also the basis of the “server meshing” technology, which is still being worked on. However, this technique would require a lot of testing time, he explains: “We suspect that the PTU phase can last up to three months, but it is difficult to predict.”

So that the further development does not come to a standstill from the player’s point of view, further content is planned: “That’s why we plan to release a content-rich alpha patch 3.17.2 with stable code, new missions, new locations and different gameplay at the end of June,” says Roberts.

But: At the end of 2022, the “big” features should also arrive – such as Persistent Streaming, but also “Salvage” and the Cargo revision. Then there is work on server meshing and the “Pyro-System” with more content and gameplay, which should also be tested at the end of the year, in Q1 2023 at the latest.

What’s still missing are release dates for things like the big “Squadron 42” campaign, which has been in the works for years and will continue to be. Earlier this year there was talk of 2023/2024 as a possible release of the first episode of an epic story that Star Citizen wants to offer.