While we often have to settle for measuring Star Citizen’s success by the amount of crowdfunding, which surpassed $500 million last month, we now know that of the 4.1 million accounts created for Star Citizen , 1.7 million players purchased the game. Free, as Giuseppe Nelva reports on the Twinfinite website.
According to Chris Roberts, although work still needs to be done before this space exploration sim can be considered a finished game, the community has shown no signs of frustration. In fact, Star Citizen has an average daily unique player count of 50,000, peaking at 130,000 on its busiest days. This compares to 10,000 daily players in 2017 and 32,000 last year.
The health of games is also reflected in the average game time of users, which is currently 180 minutes per day, compared to 48 minutes in 2017, 64 minutes in 2018 and 120 minutes in 2019. Star Citizen players have accumulated 36 million hours of gameplay starting in 2022, we’ve been told. For Chris Roberts, the increase in playtime reflects Cloud Imperium Games’ efforts to make the product more efficient and stable, knowing that the game is still in the alpha stage of development.
In addition to its famous crowdfunding, Cloud Imperium Games is also funded by private investors and currently employs no less than 835 people worldwide, with 500 of them set to live in brand new premises in Manchester this week. Finally, note that the game’s YouTube channel has posted a number of videos outlining the work in progress for the 4.0 alpha.