Letter from the Chairman: $25 Million!

Last week, when we reached $24 million, I wrote that you must like Hornets. It turns out you REALLY like Hornets: Star Citizen’s backers have propelled us to $25 million in crowd funding! This milestone also means that October has been our single biggest month for crowd funding yet… that’s truly astounding.

At $25 million, you allow us to build a stronger infrastructure for the Star Citizen alpha test:

• Enhanced Alpha – We will use additional funding to build a wider alpha test than we had originally intended for the first phase of Star Citizen’s launch. The initial plan was to first launch servers in North America and then expand to areas such as Europe and Australia to decrease latency in these areas, perfecting the game as we improve the experience around the world. This funding will allow us to invest in a wider infrastructure for our early testing, spinning up remote servers earlier. Hitting this goal will also allow us to increase the number of remaining alpha slots. Extra alpha slots not only means more Star Citizens will travel the ‘verse at launch, but that we will receive more feedback and more stress testing. This in turn will allow us to better balance and enhance the Star Citizen experience!

The tech team is already looking into the best way to make this happen! One immediate impact is that we can add 50,000 alpha slots to our test plan, which will be reflected on the site shortly. As usual, we are ready to unveil the ‘next next’ stretch goal, for the $27 million level. This is another goal that should interest everyone immediately because it allows us to expand the range of experiences you’re going to find in Star Citizen.

$27 Million

• Banu Merchantman Unlocked – Banu traders are renowed for their merchant prowess, traveling the spacelanes and trading with everyone from humans to the Vanduul! Their sturdy, dedicated trading ships are prized beyond all other transports, sometimes passing from generation to generation of Banu. At $23 million we dedicated additional resources to making Xi’An spacecraft a unique experience. At $27 million, we will expand that same thinking to the Banu! Starting with the merchant ship, the design team will expand Banu technology to offer players a completely different way of experiencing their universe.

Even though we’ve fully funded the base game, every extra dollar helps to make the experience better. The content we talk about in these stretch goals isn’t “feature creep”; it’s elements we’ve been building and planning that will be all that more impressive with additional resources. In essence, you’re putting things we’ve already discussed for the future into development now. The extra funding means we’re secure in assigning resources to go ahead and begin developing that richer content we had initially planned to fund through the game’s success upon release.

Thank you for your continued support of and trust in project. You have empowered the team to make Star Citizen something truly special… the Best Damn Space Sim Ever!

— Chris Roberts