Cloud Imperium Games says claim of $45,000 refund was 'fabricated'

Star Citizen, in addition to collecting record amounts of crowdfunding, has garnered no small share of criticism and skepticism. With myriad delays and missed deadlines, some backers who bought in early have been looking for a way out and requesting refunds. In fact, there's a subreddit devoted to the topic.

This recent post in r/starcitizen_refunds claimed that a member of a Star Citizen guild was able to acquire a $45,000 refund for three 'Completionist' backer packages that CIG sells for $15,000 each. However, a representative of CIG has denied this story in an email to PC Gamer, calling it "totally fabricated" and "wrong on so many levels."

The Reddit post contains a number of screenshots of correspondence between the poster and CIG's customer service department detailing the refund process, however: "The screenshots do not represent the actual communications which were shared to and from our support department," the CIG representative wrote. "So no…there’s nothing to it at all. There is no story."

After some follow-up questions, the representative informed me that a refund was issued recently to one customer, but in the amount of $330. I asked if it appeared this was the same customer, and if this customer had perhaps doctored the correspondence to make it appear as if the amount refunded was $45,000.

The response I got was: "Yes to the first. Yes to the second…as best as we can tell."

I've attempted to contact the Reddit poster (who said in their post that they preferred to remain anonymous) about this refund, and will update the story if I hear anything back.

Update: The redditor who made the original post has deleted their account.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.