Star Citizen raises an astronomical $35m
As Chris Roberts explains Dogfighting module delay.
Money continues to flood into the coffers of PC exclusive space trading and combat video game Star Citizen: it's now raised an astronomical $35 million.
Star Citizen already holds the world record for the most amount of money raised through crowd-funding. In a post on the Roberts Space Industries website designer Chris Roberts called the latest milestone a "monumental achievement".
A large amount of this last stretch goal has come from some 6617 new backers, Roberts said. The extra money will increase the amount of content available at the start, will allow the development team at Cloud Imperium Games to hire more staff and invest in research and development.
"Unlike a typical publisher we don't look at this initial funding as bigger profits - we look at as allowing us to deliver more of the dream sooner and ensure the online infrastructure and support is as full featured as possible, even during the pre-release period," he said.
Now that $35 million has been raised the final fan-voted space ship design has been unlocked: the Drake Herald. This is a small, armoured ship designed to safely deliver information.
Onwards to the next stretch goal: for $37 million the Tanga System will be unlocked. It seems inevitable Star Citizen will get it. Voting on the $38 million stretch goal has begun. When - and at what amount - will crowdfunding for Star Citizen end?
Tempering the excitement however was last week's announcement that the release of the hotly-anticipated Dogfighting module had been delayed.
"I know it was disappointing for many people, and it wasn't a decision that I took lightly but after much deliberation I decided it was best for the long term health of the project," Roberts said.
"The various modules are a great way of engaging all of you and providing useful feedback to the team. But for me their strongest benefit is providing smaller, shorter terms goals for the team to achieve, while working towards is a pretty daunting feature set for the full game. It forces us to finish a feature with enough polish that hundreds of thousands of people can experience it."
He continued: "In my heart I didn't want to rush out something that would be a stop gap. Testing the head to head aspect is the one I'm most focused on. I've made a lot of single player games - I know that we can knock that out of the park but I really want to make sure that the multiplayer combat is fun, compelling and that we solve the various challenges in having the controls and flight model work smoothly online.
"That was what the Dogfight Module was always intended to be at its core and so at the end of the day I felt I would be letting myself down, as well as everyone in the community if I didn't deliver a module that lived up to the goals I wanted to achieve. Even though I want the community's feedback that's only useful when I'm mostly happy with how something plays and looks and I'm not there yet on the multiplayer dogfighting."
