Fans have been dutifully tracking year-over-year earnings for the bold, and at times controversial, project. With Cloud Imperium Games not always flaunting record breaking earnings - likely on purpose, though they do share large, whole-number milestones - it’s up to this sort of grassroots record keeping to see how interest and popularity fluctuate over the years. The company always makes the exact amount of collected funds and active accounts public, but statistics are hard to compare.
According to these metrics, Star Citizen recieved $79 million in crowdfunded money throughout 2020, which was beaten last year - 2021 saw funding to the tune of $86.4 million. Fans aren’t slowing down either, with over $500,000 pledged in the few days of 2022 that have already passed. The massive amounts of money that have flowed into the Star Citizen project since the initial Kickstarter campaign have been funneled towards more and more elaborate and ambitious features and concepts, endlessly pushing the game’s eventual release date out of view - but the developers have been making the bits of content that are finished playable for backers, and thoroughly documenting stuff being worked on currently - if nothing else, Star Citizen will be one of the most transparent looks into game development as it happens the industry ever saw. Speaking of, as the title quietly broke a funding record, Cloud Imperium Games is gearing up for some upcoming releases, updates and events. In a new video, focusing on the Jumptown 2.0 and Luminalia events also took time to describe physics tweaks to the Gravlev bike vehicle class, making these smaller, speedy vehicles more reliable. The solution to the hovering bikes’ weird clipping issues was making them not hover anymore - at least, as far as the physics engine is concerned. Gravlev bikes were given new, invisible suspension systems. As these were being detailed, Cloud Imperium Games also unveiled a new bike model from the in-game manufacturer Consolidated Outland, with no additional info as of yet. The invisible suspensions are applied to all such bikes, though, not just the new one. While the new suspensions were added to the game with Alpha 3.16 at the end of 2021, the new bike is still shrouded in mystery, so we’ll just have to wait and see how things go. If the past few years were any indication, 2022 is going to be big for Star Citizen. Will it yield any release dates? Who knows - but the project is already big enough before launch to make it certain that its eventual release will have major impact on the MMO market.
