Star Citizen shoots past $200 million in crowdfunding ahead of free week

Star Citizen has just zoomed past the $200 million crowdfunding mark. That monumental number looks even bigger when you put it alongside the biggest video game budgets of all times: only three other games—GTA 5, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Star Wars: The Old Republic—have ever had budgets of more than $200 million to play with.

The freeform multiplayer space sim still doesn't have a release date (developer Cloud Imperium Games has promised a full roadmap next month), but that hasn't stopped would-be spacefarers from flocking to it. According to its funding page, more than 2 million backers have stuck money in at an average of around $94 per person.

It was helped by the influx of money it received during CitizenCon last month, where it revealed another star-studded trailer for Squadron 42, its singleplayer spin-off.

It will probably get another big funding injection next weekend, too, because it's going to be free to play from November 23 to November 30. You'll be able to explore Hurston, the game's very first planet, which launches alongside the free trial period. Read more about the free week in Chris's piece here.

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.