A Slow Start For Star Citizen's Intergalactic Aerospace Expo in 2024

On Friday Cloud Imperium Games launched the beginning of Star Citizen's Intergalactic Aerospace Expo. Star Citizen's biggest event, the IAE has two purposes. The first is to attract as many new players to the game as possible. The second is to make as much money as possible. Lasting this year from 22 November to 5 December, the first weekend of the event is now in the books. According to the statistics available at the CCU Game dashboard, the event is down compared to 2023.

One of the concerns I had was whether the announcements at this year's CitizenCon would negatively impact the IAE. In October, CIG openly declared Star Citizen will be a full loot, PvP sandbox. Perhaps most importantly in terms of ship sales, the company announced AI crews to help solo players fly multi-crew ships was not a feature Star Citizen would possess at launch. 

In other words, solo pilots could not expect to use AI crews until the four systems not yet in the game -- Pyro, Nyx, Castra, and Terra -- were fully complete and in the game. Pyro will enter the Persistent Universe with the launch of Alpha 4.0, but the other planets? Even if CIG completes one system per year, the soonest solo players can expect to hire AI crews is sometime in 2028. And given CIG's track record, the year is probably closer to 2032.

The 1st weekend's performance

On the matter of attracting new players, CIG is on a bit of a two-year losing streak. The possibility exists of the game not attracting the creation of new accounts at 2021's level of 524,161. This weekend's performance is typical of the issue. Over the first three days, the 18,894 accounts created is 33.5% behind 2023's count of 28,432 over the number recorded by last year's first weekend.

The sales numbers are not quite as bad. Over the first weekend the IAE generated almost $4.2 million in sales. Still, the amount is 14.1% behind 2023's pace of $4.9 million. Perhaps the most significant piece of information is this year is that far behind even after the limited time sales of the Idris and Javelin.

Perhaps one of the biggest reason for following the two-week sales event is the potential impact on the Star Citizen player base. The last time the IAE suffered a year-over-year decline was 2014. A decade of sustained growth, at least for an event, can lead to complacency. A lot of the content creators I watch don't seem to think sales could go down this year. Admittedly, I still don't think the streak will end this year, but I'm not as sure as I was last week. If the event doesn't pull in $24.5 million like last year, do we start hearing louder cries of "Star Citizen is dying"?