Another year has passed for Star Citizen, and it's time to take a look at its crowdfunding tally to see how it has progressed in 2023.
Fans of the game have pledged just north of 117.5 million dollars to the cause over the past year through the purchase of base packages, ships, subscriptions, and various goodies.
According to the handy tracker by CCU Game, this total is up 3.4% compared to the $113 million gathered in 2023. It's also the largest crowdfunding year of Star Citizen's whole 12-year-long history.
This is actually the sixth year in a row in which Cloud Imperium Games' space simulator has achieved growth in its yearly crowdfunding tally. Following (and prior to) a small decline in 2017, every year has been bigger than the one that came before.
Incidentally, the number of registered accounts has also just passed 5 million, which certainly isn't bad even if not all of them are paying customers.
Many accounts are created for free to try the game during periods in which it doesn't require pledging to access.
The continued growth of the support that Star Citizen is receiving from its fanbase certainly wasn't guaranteed, especially earlier in 2023.
2022 has been a slow year for the game's major update cycle with only Alpha 3.17 seeing a release.
On top of that, Alpha 3.18 in March of 2023 launched with what Cloud Imperium itself admitted was a "super rough start" due to the injection of innovative but unstable technology.
The combination of these factors certainly caused a slowdown in pledges that made it seem like the game's support could decline for the first time in years.
Yet, the developers pulled up their sleeves and released Alpha 3.19, 3.20, 3.21, and 3.22 in relatively rapid succession, bringing a lot of content and features online.
The year then culminated with an impressive Citizencon and the announcement that the single-player campaign Squadron 42 is feature-complete.
This restored faith in the process among many backers and led to a very successful Intergalactic Aerospace Expo, including the game's biggest crowdfunding day ever.
As Chris Roberts' dream is progressively taking shape, and the perspective of a release of Squadron 42 is becoming more and more solid, it'll be interesting to see how Star Citizen will fare in 2024. So far, so good.
Full disclosure: the author of this post backed Star Citizen's crowdfunding campaign.
