The crowdfunding effort for the space simulator Star Citizen continues, and the game just enjoyed its biggest day of funding ever.
According to the handy Star Citizen Funding Dashboard by CCU Game, we learn that on November 25 fans of the game spent almost $3.5 million (more precisely $3,497,000) to support it in 24 hours, the highest amount the 11-year history of the game developed by Chris Roberts' Cloud Imperium Gaames.
This corresponds to the RSI Day at the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo 2593 event, which included the debut of the multi-crew mining ship RSI Arrastra.
The Intergalactic Aerospace Expo is an in-game event celebrating Star Citizen's spaceship brands with an exhibition that you could compare to a real-world Motor Show, usually including the reveal of new ships and vehicles, promotional sales, and a long free-to-play period, which is still ongoing until November 30.
It's usually the highest funding driver for Star Citizen every year, and the day dedicated to RSI tends to always be super-popular. As a matter of fact, the second and third best-selling days for the games are both RSI-focused days of the IAE as well, in 2022 and 2020. Back then the game received $3.27 million and $2.99 million in funding respectively.
The game has now received $644,331,840 from its backers, of which $104 million in 2023. This year still has a solid chance to be the best year yet for the game, potentially beating the $113 million pledged in 2022.
November 2023 is also already the biggest crowdfunding month of the game's history, with over $23 million in funding, narrowly beating November 2022.
Interestingly, funding had slowed down considerably earlier in the year, mostly due to malcontent created by the long cycle of Alpha 3.17, which lasted almost a year, and the rough launch of patch 3.18 due to the implementation of new technology that proved disruptive.
Yet, the pace of updates has picked back up with some pretty large releases, and the success of CitizenCon with the presentation of some rather impressive content on top of the announcement that the single-player campaign Squadron 42 is feature-complete reignited the enthusiasm for the game.
Star Citizen is a crowdfunded game that initiated its campaign in 2012, driven by the mind of Chris Roberts, creator of the famous Wing Commander series. While the game has not been officially released yet, an alpha version with growing features and semi-regular updates has been playable for backers for several years.
It counts 4,948,477 registered accounts, albeit not all of them are paying customers. Many create an account to take part in the free-fly events like the one that is going on right now.
Full disclosure: the author of this post backed Star Citizen's crowdfunding campaign.
