Star Citizen crowdfunded another $35 million in 2017

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Slightly down on last year, but still an astronomical number.

Star Citizen's slow progress through development has clearly not dampened fans' appetite for its promise of free-form, open-world space simming. Despite already smashing through all its stretch goals before the start of 2017, it managed to pull in an extra $35 million during the calendar year, bringing its total to $176 million raised.

Figures that the development team provided to Polygon put the exact figure raised in 2017 at $34.91 million. That is ever-so-slightly down on the $36.11 million it raised in 2016, and it doesn't account for any returns requested by backers. But it's still a huge number, and the fact that it has sustained so much momentum since its Kickstarter launch in 2012 is extraordinary.

Glancing at the funding timeline on the game's website shows that a lot of the funding came at the end of the year, with November and December pulling in around $6 million each. There was a big spike in the last week of November, around the same time as developer Cloud Imperium Games began selling plots of land in the game for $100 a pop.

It missed a lot of its development deadlines in 2017: its 3.0 alpha build was only made available to backers in December on the public test servers, three months after it was meant to release, for example. But it's still been a year of progress, and you can read about most of it here. The game has no projected release date.

To put the $35 million in perspective, that's more than double the total amount of money raised by successful video game Kickstarter projects in 2017. That figure, according to Polygon, was $17.25 million.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.