Cloud Imperium Is Late With Its 2023 Financial Information

I am sitting in my bunker in an undisclosed location waiting on Cloud Imperium Games to release financial information related to the year 2023. For all of the company's vaunted transparency, CIG does tend to hang onto financial information until any revelations become old news. I guess as long as all investors in the company have the information and CIG isn't hiding information from potential investors, no harm, no foul.

Now comes the "but". But one of the reasons for CIG to post a financial report like it has every year since the first tranche of Calder investment money arrived in 2018 is to make sure potential investors can do their due diligence before making investment plans. I would have stated "every December since 2018," but last year the company waited until 2 January 2024 to post the public financial report for 2022 on its corporate website. And this year CIG will post the information later still.

The year 2023 had a big question. Did Cloud Imperium expand too fast? According to the 2022 financial report, CIG's workforce headcount went from 860 at the end of 2022 to over 1100 at the end of 2023. As best as I can tell, the added labor costs would have added between $21 million and $26 million to CIG's 2023 budget. Add in that cash shop sales in 2023 only increased by $4 million and one has to wonder how much money CIG lost in 2023. After all, in 2022 Cloud Imperium's financial report only showed a profit of $1.3 million.

A conspiracy theorist would jump on the evidence so far and shout to the world Chris Roberts is trying to hide how badly CIG is doing by hiding the evidence from players. I'm not such a theorist, however. I will admit the theory fits Occam's razor in that, all other things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation for a phenomenon.

I do have two facts on my side suggesting all other things are not equal. The first is CIG has still not submitted its group of companies accounts with UK Companies House. For the 2022 accounts, CIG did not file until 3 March 2024. The second is the mid-year acquisition of Turbulent for $CA 9.8 million ($USD 7.4 million) plus stocks.

While Occam's razor is a fine principle to live by, many times Hanlon's razor applies. We saw an example last year with the late submission of the 2022 accounts. Turns out, amongst a host of issues, the new auditors found an accounting mistake stretching back 5 years. And honestly, I'm not too surprised at the lateness of the 2023 reports due to the complications the Turbulent sale brought to the situation. If the auditors from PriceWaterhouseCooper are not tearing their hair out trying to explain things to CIG, I'd be surprised. After all, the possibility exists the Calders' put option for both 2025 and 2028 are causing friction and delays.

I do need to conclude with a poke at the creators who may try to excuse publishing the financial data in January as "business as normal." I actually watched a YouTube video where the commentator attempted to tell the audience this. So for my own sanity I will record the publication dates of previous financial reports on CIG's corporate website here, along with handy links to save people, including myself, time.

• Years 2012-2017 - December 20, 2018
• Year 2018 - December 20, 2019
• Year 2019 - December 23, 2020
• Year 2020 - December 22, 2021
• Year 2021 - December 30, 2022
• Year 2022 - January 2, 2024

And while I'm on a history kick, here are the dates going back to 2015 for the submission of accounts to Companies House. The dates are the dates posted to the Companies House website, so the days submitted are usually 5 working days earlier.

• Thru 31 December 2015 - 5 January 2017
• Thru 31 December 2016 - 24 October 2017
• Thru 31 December 2017 - 26 October 2018
• Thru 31 December 2018 - 10 October 2019
• Thru 31 December 2019 - 6 January 2021
• Thru 31 December 2020 - 14 October 2021
• Thru 31 December 2021 - 10 January 2023
• Thru 31 December 2022 - 11 March 2024

And since the time in the UK is now past 6pm on a Friday, I feel pretty safe in posting this article now. So from my bunker in an undisclosed location, I'll keep waiting for the financial information I need to close out 2023.

A Look At EVE Online Activity In December 2024

Another year is in the books. I think EVE Online had a so-so year. While much better than two years ago, 2024 kind of sputtered, with revenue growth coming from the new SKINR system rather than attracting more players to the game. Perhaps I'm wrong and my perceptions of the game are off since nowadays I do more planetary interaction and hauling gameplay than anything else. So let's jump into the latest available statistics and take a look.

First up is Jester's full year graph on average concurrent users. At the end of 2023 the graph showed a rise in the fourth quarter of the year up to around 23,000 ACU. Last year saw the number of accounts logged in hang around the 23,000 mark except during the summer. After a year in which Viridian did very well, the summer slump returned in 2024. And after an expansion bump, the ACU returned to around 23,000 at the end of 2024. The one noticeable difference is that in December 2023 the trend was increasing while at the end of 2024 the trend was decreasing.

Data from Dotlan Maps

Performing a month-over-month comparison, one would hope ship explosions would increase in the first full month after an expansion. The only security band in known space to see an increase was in low sec. First, the decrease in the other two bands might indicate a lack of interest in the new content in Revenant, with some players returning to low sec. Second, perhaps my disinterest in Winter Nexus isn't a minority opinion after all, especially with so many SKINR materials sprinkled throughout the event. And finally, perhaps especially true in null sec, players were taking a break before the big un-bluing of the major coalitions from each other beginning on New Year's Day.

Data from Dotlan Maps

Looking back to December 2023, the trends were increasing everywhere except for killing NPCs in high sec and other players in low security space. With two expansions in 2024 more focused on null sec than anywhere else, the dip in player-owned ship explosions in low sec was expected. But the year-over-year, as well as month-over-month drop in NPC deaths in high sec might indicate an issue or two with this year's Winter Nexus event.

Data from Dotlan Maps

Speaking of looking back in time, what about the explosions for the entire year? As one might expect, numbers of explosions were up across the board except in low sec. While the PvE changes took hold from 18 months of low sec heavy expansions, player ship deaths did drop by 5.5%. Still, the number of NPCs killed by null sec players increased by one-third in 2024 compared to 2023. The downward trends at the end of 2024 are a concern, but just looking at the year as a whole the growth looked good. Or, in other words, we had another year of, "Yeah, but..."

Cloud Imperium Games Records $116.7 Million In Cash Shop Sales For 2023

According to the player-run CCU Game Star Citizen funding dashboard, Cloud Imperium Games earned $774 million in sales through its cash shop at Roberts Space Industries from October 2012 through the end of last year. For 2024, the company recorded $116.7 million, a 0.8% decrease from 2023's total of $117.6 million.

For the month of December, sales increased to $18.7 million, or 122.3%, year-over-year compared to December 2023's total of $8.4 million. In large part, the increase is attributable to a quirk in the calendar. CIG starts its annual Intergalactic Aerospace Expo on the Friday before Black Friday. For 2024, the timing pushed 5 days of sales from November into December. The other reason was the timing of the release of Alpha 4.0. Looking back, a sale was missing in the middle of October, right before CitizenCon. Given the rush to push the release to live servers, I believe the accompanying ship sale was originally supposed to occur the week before CitizenCon in order to increase sales for that event.

The fourth quarter of 2024 saw cash shop sales reach $48.2 million. While the second largest quarterly total in company history, the amount resulted in a 6.4% YoY revenue decline compared to Q4 2023's $51.5 million. Two of CIG's biggest sales events, the IAE and CitizenCon both occur in the fourth quarter. Both events saw revenue fall year-over-year, the IAE for the first time since 2014. 

I do wonder how much announcements at CitizenCon affected CIG's financial performance during the fourth quarter. First, Squadron 42 was announced to release sometime in 2026 instead of 2025 which most people probably expected. The second was the revelation that the 1.0 version of Star Citizen will resemble EVE Online a lot more than a lot of existing players expected. While to this EVE Online player the movement of Star Citizen becoming a full-loot, hardcore PvP sandbox MMORPG was pretty clear, the presentation at CitizenCon made the company's design goals unmistakable as anything else. Finally, the announcement that Star Citizen 1.0 would not include AI crews for multi-crew ships. The player-base includes a lot of people who want to fly their ships solo. Given the 1.0 release is probably at least 5 years away, I can see a lot of primarily solo players ceasing to purchase the multi-crew ships, which tend to be the most expensive in Star Citizen.

For those who keep track of new accounts (aka "new citizens"), December's 45,937 was only 2% less than the total of 46.897 in December 2023. For the quarter, CIG attracted the creation of 138,209 new accounts, a 19.5% decrease over Q4 2023's total of 171,771. For the entire year of 2024, account generation was down 28.4%, with 484,271 accounts vs last year's number of 676,560.

The $774 million displayed on the Roberts Space Industries funding page is not a comprehensive accounting for all of CIG's revenue since the project's Kickstarter in October 2012. Overall, the company has recorded $872.6 million in confirmed revenue (the funding page & the 2022 financial report).

• Sales/Pledges: $774.0 million (through 31 December 2024)
• Subscriptions: $33.0 million (through 31 December 2022)
• All other sources: $65.6 million (through 31 December 2022)

In addition, the company has received a total of $63.25 million in outside investment. According to the 2022 financial report, $4.8 million of the amount was returned to investors in 2020. Including the outside investment money, the total amount raised by CIG to create Squadron 42 and Star Citizen is $935.8 million, or $931.0 million when excluding the returned funds.

Finally, I need to make a point for this last post about Cloud Imperium's cash shop revenue for 2024. I realize the subscription and all other source revenue totals are now two years out of date. The reason is CIG has, as of 1830 UTC on 1 January 2025, not released the financial report for 2023. When giving the amount of revenue collected, I only want to use original source material from Cloud Imperium and no estimates. Hopefully the report will appear on the Cloud Imperium corporate site soon so I may start the reporting for 2025 with up to date data showing the company closing in on $1 billion in revenue. Barring a catastrophe, CIG should reach that mark sometime in 2025.