Cloud Imperium Makes $2 Million On The First Day Of Star Citizen's Alpha 4.0

Work was crazy this week and limited my blogging. But I had to make note of an event that occurred in Star Citizen: the launch of Alpha 4.0 yesterday.

Daily Sales From The Roberts Space Industries Website

In a Letter from the Chairman, Cloud Imperium founder and CEO Chris Roberts spelled out exactly what the launch looked like.

After a much longer than anticipated development process, what was teased in 2019 becomes a reality for all players when we launch Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 to the live servers, as part of what we are calling the 4.0 Preview.  

For the first time in our history, we will run 2 live releases in parallel, each with their own progress and persistence. This means you'll have the unique opportunity to choose which version you want to dive into, at least for a little while. At this stage, we both want and need the high traffic of a Live release to thoroughly test Server Meshing and the newly refactored systems that rely on it as they go through their final paces. We acknowledge that we did not have time to get all the mission types working before our holiday break, which is why we have decided to temporarily support two parallel Live tracks: Alpha 3.24.3 will remain available, so you can play the missions and engage in game loops that are not working to our new playability standards in 4.0. Meanwhile, the 4.0 Preview will also be accessible from your launcher as a second Live option. If you are not interested in previewing 4.0, you can simply select Alpha 3.24.3 from the dropdown and continue enjoying the current live build.  

This may feel like our usual PTU process, but there is one key difference: by running both builds on the Live environment, we can take steps to ensure that your progress on 4.0 will carry over. Our goal is for anything you do and earn in the 4.0 Preview to persist without any further wipes—unless something major happens, though we do not anticipate that.

That said, it's important to note that progress made in Alpha 3.24.3 will remain tied to that version and will not transfer to 4.0. This allows us to maintain a clean slate for the new systems coming online in the 4.0 Preview, ensuring a consistent and stable environment as we look to deprecate 3.24.3 in the new year.

Honestly, I'm not sure how much of a launch yesterday was. But one thing I know is CIG always runs a ship sale when a patch launches. Back in October I thought CIG removed a ship sale. Looking back I have the feeling Alpha 4.0 was supposed to release in the middle of October a week before CitizenCon.

With the launch of Alpha 4.0 came a 17-ship sale in the cash shop. And on the first day CIG brought in $1,988,088. As of the time of the screenshot at the beginning of the post, cash shop revenue was up to $111.5 million for 2024, or $6.1 million short of 2023's sales. With 10 days to go, CIG still has an outside shot of matching last year's total.

I should add one additional piece of information from the Letter to the Chairman. Chris Roberts revealed the servers hosted 32 million hours of play time this year. Converting to average concurrent users, the Star Citizen servers averaged 3700 players flying or running around at any time. In comparison, over the past year EVE Online has averaged around 23,000 users logged in at any one time. Given CIG has experienced twice the sales of CCP Games over the last few years, I was a little surprised at how small the Star Citizen player base really is.