Chris Roberts: Star Citizen is making 'tremendous strides'

Cloud Imperium Games founder and CEO Chris Roberts has taken some time to write a rather large update to Star Citizen Fans, winding down 2020 and setting the bar for 2021. You can read the big blog post here.

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In the post, Roberts talks about how good the year has been for Star Citizen -- noting the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic had on work-from-home policies. The developer had 4 separate updates for Star Citizen for 2020, ranging from Alpha 3.9 through to Alpha 3.12 and a bunch of new features and content along the way.

Star Citizen had record players in 2020 with gamers from over 200 unique countries and territories across the world, with over 740,000 players playing Star Citizen in 2020. This breaks down to people playing from 56,340 unique cities and pumping in a huge 26,576,364 hours into the game.

• Read more: Star Citizen roadmap for 2020/2021: updated

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In the post, Roberts writes that CIG had a record year in 2019 with $48 million in sales revenue -- but 2020 has been much bigger so far at 60% higher and hitting over $80 million for the year. Roberts write sthat some might think this is all "all old backers spending more, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Fueling this explosive growth is new players discovering Star Citizen for the first time. Revenues are a lagging indicator, and by themselves tell a very small part of the story".

"Only if you are doing everything else right will players come and will spending rise. The single biggest takeaway for 2020 is that as we shifted towards a "Playable Now" narrative and delivered more features and content, alongside a greater emphasis on quality of life and performance, we found ourselves drawing more and more new gamers into our universe and reactivating more old backers to return to check out our progress. And despite the fact that we continue to be alpha software with bugs and developing features, these players - new and reactivated - are sticking around in greater numbers than ever before".

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