Crowdfunding campaign

Start Citizen starter pack

In October 2012, following the announcement of Star Citizen at GDC online, Cloud Imperium Games started a crowdfunding campaign on their own website for Star Citizen, still ongoing to this day.

Why Crowdfunding?

Chris Roberts didn't see any benefits to a traditional publisher for an online game.

The original plan was to raise some money from private investors to build a sort of alpha that didn't have everything Chris Roberts wanted in it but would have been enough that he could give it to someone and they could play it and give him a reduced amount of money he could use to continue adding features until he built it to his final feature set. Wing Commander I was similarly funded by showing basic gameplay first. It would prove to investors that there was a player base.

At most Chris Roberts hoped to bring in $2 million to $4 million with crowdfunding and add in another $10 million from investors to pay for a functional alpha. Then he planned to use that to start bringing in revenue which would be used to finance the rest of the game.

He was inspired by examples such as Minecraft and League of Legends.

As new year came and 7 or 8 millions had been raised securing investors, Sandi Gardiner said that no investors were needed and that at least 20 millions could be raised by the end of the year. Chris Roberts said she was crazy and she asked him to give it a few months to prove it.

There are many benefits to crowdfunding. First of all it allows Cloud Imperium Games to break any ties with the standard triple-A developers and publishers. This means that Star Citizen has no deadlines or constrains, the stretch goals can be increased and most importantly, there are no shareholders expecting to earn a big cut of profits, nor are there emotionally disinterested publishers forcing decisions, or wanting to sell the studio to a bigger one. This also allows to keep private servers running as opposed to a big publisher shutting the game servers down when they are no longer profitable. This isn't to say that such bigger organizations creating interference are wrong or evil, but that they have different priorities.

Also important, is the fact that backers expect to be given constant updates about the game's development state. Star Citizen accomplishes this through their Comm-Links and the YouTube page.

Crowdfunding Timeline

Original Site

CIG created their own website and platform to establish a direct relationship with the interested community. The original Site showcased a trailer for Star Citizen with lore and an original goal of $2,000,000 USD for development. Due to CIG limited funds, they had commissioned the site design to a small developer and it couldn't cope with the success, collapsing intermittently during the campaign, which led to using Kickstarter in parallel, and to being refered to Turbulent to help with the website.

Kickstarter

Kickstarter logo

With the website being overloaded, Kickstarter offered to help, leading to a temporary Kickstarter campaign being used in parallel starting October 18th 2012.

Continued RSI site funding

$700,000,000 USD later as of May 2024, Star Citizen is one of the largest crowdfunded projects in the world and it continues to steadily grow. Additional Stretch Goals were developed beyond the original $2 million with expanded systems, ships, mechanics, and other features. Kickstarter was used in parallel with early crowdfunding, with all current funding managed through the RSI Website Funding page

Crowdfunding Rewards

• Stretch Goals
• Early backer rewards

Current Funding

• Basic ship packages.
• Ship Sales.
• Squadron 42.
• Monthly Subscription.
• Merchandise.
• Extras (Skins, Hangars, UEC, add ons).

Quotes

"We said, ‘Give us more money and we’ll give you a better digital ship in the [game’s] universe.’ That was kind of revolutionary, since before that it was ‘We’ll give you statue, or a bigger box or dinner with development team.’ ... As a gamer, if I’m backing a game, I want something that improves the game, not sits off to the side." -Chris Roberts

Trivia

• Star Citizen holds the Guiness World Record for Most crowdfunded Videogame
• The higher priced ships were just thought of as different tier rewards for different tiers of backing. It was unexpected and accidental that individual players would want to buy and collect a lot of ships and have various professions.
• Chris Roberts partially credits the kickstarter social community itself which likes to find cool projects they want to back. He also reckons that the crowdfunding on Kickstarter brought new people to it who then invested in other projects
• Chris Roberts credits the success of the crowdfunding campaign to a lack of competition at the time, and to actually showing how the game would look like rather than just writing how it would look like, thus having a more emotional connection and making it feel much more real, as well as the aforementionned accidental buying of multiple ships priced differently, with people being impatient, liking to collect different ships, and wanting rewards for the amount of extra money they put into the game.
• The fundraising ratio was about 2:1 for the website vs kickstarter.
• At the conclusion of the initial crowdfunding campaign, CIG consisted of only a handful of collaborators without any physical studio facilities.