Star Citizen continues to rake in millions

Anyone with more than a fraction of a bitcoin sitting in a wallet at the moment, is no doubt starting their day by popping up MtGox or a similar site and checking the current value. It's understandable, that currency's individual cost is flying up day after day. But if you're someone like Chris Roberts, the guy behind Star Citizen, I imagine you're having the same feeling each day when you check the totals from pledges to your game, as every single day, it's taking in over half a million dollars.

As it stands, Star Citizen has raised over $33 million (£20.2) million, from a total of more than 317,000 backers. That would be impressive alone if it had done so throughout some focused Kickstarter campaign – in-fact it “only” made about $2 million from its campaign – but no, most of this has come in afterwards and some of it very recently.

Yesterday for example, Star Citizen fans pledged over $500,000 to the game developers. The day before that, it was nearly $1.5 million. This is despite the fact that just a week before, over a whole seven days, only a few hundred thousand was raised. Clearly RSI is doing something to excite people enough to pledge that bit more. Mostly it seems to be about selling upgrades and unlocks for when the game is released.

How much would you pay for one of these? 

There's also stretch goals to consider which Star Citizen fans keep surpassing, meaning Roberts and his crew are forced to add yet more to the game. Most recently – for hitting the $33 million mark – it announced the addition of the Anvil Carrack pathfinder spacecraft and the Drake Herald ship, a data transmission vessel.

Looking forward, Roberts has plans to add new systems with the next give stretch goals, which he seems perfectly assured will be passed in short order.

KitGuru Says: The most impressive thing with this game though, is how it doesn't ever seem to suffer from feature bloat. Games like Double Fine's Broken Age which should have been finished in record time after easily surpassing its requested development total, have ended up taking far longer and in that instance were even split into two games. Here's hoping Star Citizen still releases on time in early 2015 – though we'll be able to check its progress off that bit better when the Alpha and Beta hit in 2014. 

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