Star Citizen Has Raised How Much?

Star Citizen is in the news once again. On the positive side, the latest ship sale pushed player funding for the game over $250 million USD.

Star Citizen Funding Page As Seen on 5 December 2019

On the negative side, at least for Cloud Imperium Games, the BBC produced technology show Click is broadcasting an episode on Star Citizen:

Click investigates why there has been continued delays in bringing $250m crowd funded video game Star Citizen from Gameplay [sic] testing to market.

Now, $250 million is an amazing number. Going back to when Chris Roberts began the current Star Citizen project in late 2011/early 2012, the $200 million Bioware reportedly spent producing Star Wars: The Old Republic was considered a massive amount of money. But the crowd funding is not all the money raised by Chris Roberts and Cloud Imperium Games.

In December 2018, CIG released financial information to the public after receiving $46 million in private funding designated to market Squadron 42 & Star Citizen.

Cloud Imperium Games income, 2012-2017

In the first 5 years of operations, CIG had collected an additional $11.2 million in subscriptions. CIG also raised an additional $10.3 million in "other income", defined as:

Income from incentives, sponsors, licensing and partnerships. This also includes timing differences and bookings for exchange rate differences between the standard rates used for the counter and actual exchange rates received.

So through today, CIG has raised at least $274.7 million. But we don't know how much CIG raised in subscriptions and other inomce. Given that in both 2016 and 2017 CIG raised $8.8 million for both categories, I think a reasonable estimate through the end of 2019 is an additional $17.6 million. Prorating that amount gives us an estimate of $16.9 million raised for the period January 2018 - November 2019.

Raising $291 million is a fairly impressive amount. Add in the $46 million in private funding and Cloud Imperium as raised an estimated $337 million to create and market Squadron 42 and Star Citizen. And given the beta for Squadron 42 was pushed back another 3 months to Q3 2020, I anticipate that by the time the first game launches, the funding raised will approach $400 million.