O
n October 10th it will be a decade since the Crowd Imperium Games founder, Chris Roberts, announced Star Citizen
at GDC, since which time CIG has continued to amass an ever deepening warchest of crowdfunding credits, currently standing at £318m ($422m). By most estimations that makes Star Citizen the most successful game to have never been released. Coming from the creator of the most expensively-produced games of the 1990s, that perhaps is no surprise, but what continues to baffle detractors is how without any release date in sight, CIG continues to gather financial support, a significant amount of which comes from the sale of in-game ships that are either unrealised or unfinished. The appeal for its 3.4 million backers is that Star
Citizen exists – albeit in alpha form – outside of many of the norms of modern game development. It is the most extreme example of an early access title, which has allowed CIG to stick to its own trajectory, even if a course correction has often been necessary and a final destination seems forever distant. However, the news last November that CIG’s main
development studio in Cheshire would be moving to Manchester’s Enterprise City, site of the Old Granada Studios, with a view to expanding operations to 1000 staff within five years, seemed to suggest that while we may never know where Star Citizen will end up or what state it will be in when it gets there, we can at least put an ETA to when that that might be: Five years from now, if our maths is correct, is the year 2027. “I think by that time we’ll be operating a very
large MMORPG,” says Carl Jones, COO of Cloud Imperium Games. “So there’ll be a lot more publishing resources, a lot more games masters, more player support. That may require us to open facilities in other locations. At the moment we don’t have any major Asia Pacific presence and that’s probably something that will have to come in the long run, because if your game explodes over there, then you
“Hopefully we can progress Squadron 42 through to completion faster. We want to get that game finished, but it will be finished when it’s ready.”
January 2022 MCV/DEVELOP | 19
really need to start building up teams to service that.” Jones suggests that while the potential to expand
the new Manchester studio beyond its planned 1000-person capacity exists, the world is practically CIG’s oyster. It might be Europe or the US that CIG heads to next. The point is that CIG will increasingly resemble an online game publisher, “we’ll still have huge development resources, because by that time we’ll be developing the sequel and sequels for Squadron 42.”
Squadron 42 (bottom) shares the same universe as Star Citizen (top), but will be a cinematic single-player game.
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