Star Citizen breaks $1 billion in funding from less than 7 million players

Star Citizen has broken a new sales milestone, and it's as big as they get in the games industry.

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Cloud Imperium Games has finally done it: Star Citizen has officially broken $1 billion in player funding. The news was confirmed on the official RSI website, which shows the game has generated over $1 billion in crowdfunding across just 6.5 million users, which is no small feat to say the least.

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CIG also has the benefit of owning the Star Citizen IP on a development and publishing label, that Star Citizen has its own private launcher, and that the studio has a rare direct digital monetization stream that can deliver high-margin earnings. In short, Star Citizen is less of a game than it is a bustling economy within itself that facilitates ship purchases and the like after the main game is bought--it's not unlike most live games in this way, but it's proven to be highly durable with resilient revenues.

A quick scan of Star Citizen's earnings breakdown shows the game makes around $1 million per day, with spending hitting an astronomical $9.6 million thanks to a new ship, the Anvil Odin battlecruiser, priced at a cool $5,000. Few games can pull this off, especially for such a long time.

Also, to give an idea how well Star Citizen has done, Fortnite made $20 billion in gross earnings from 2018 - 2023, and Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto franchise has made more than $10.58 billion in earnings since GTA V's release in 2013.

The studio hopes to release the final version of Star Citizen in 2027 or 2028, and is still diligently working on the standalone singleplayer campaign, Squadron 42. No release date has been announced but CIG hopes to release Squadron 42 sometime this year.