No Squadron 42 At 2025's CitizenCon Direct

As I follow Cloud Imperium Game's single player game under development, Squadron 42, I'm beginning to get flashbacks to another long-delayed game, Pearl Abyss' Crimson Desert. I was expecting to get an update on Squadron 42 next month at CitizenCon. The game is finally supposed to launch sometime in 2026, presumably a few months after May's launch of Grand Theft Auto VI. But on Thursday's Star Citizen Live: Tech Talk w/ Benoit Beausejour, we learned no launch date will be forthcoming in October.

Cloud Imperium's Jared Huckaby made the following announcement:

I do want to say some more things about CitizenCon Direct. If you're a subscriber to the Squadron 42 newsletter that just went out with a with a map of the Odin system. There was a note at the end there about the Squadron 42 team still being heads down and working on that. I want to second the information there and I want to star-splain the information that was there. There will be no Squadron 42 presence at CitizenCon Direct this year. So, just in case there was any kind of kind of people were like, I didn't quite understand the message or maybe the message wasn't, you know, fully clear and what not and if it wasn't, maybe that was on us.

That team is heads down. We drew a line in the sand when we said 2026. I don't know if we're going to make it. I just know that we're going to do every single thing possible to make it. And part of that is not taking time for the distraction of CitizenCon. It's why we're not doing a larger event this year. It's why we're doing a smaller, more focused thing. Even when we did digital CitizenCon, those were still these big 6, 8, 10 hour things. We called that CitizenCon. This is not CitizenCon.

It's CitizenCon Direct. It's a much smaller, more focused thing specifically on the work of the Star Citizen team and what they plan for the next year of development. We're not going to look at 1.0 stuff. It’s just we're going to take a look at what the next year of our intention is for that. So it's a much smaller more dedicated thing. I think you're still going to enjoy it. People who are working on it are doing a lot of really hard work to make it as entertaining and informative as possible. 

But again, just want to be real clear with the expectations management. No Squadron 42 presence at all. That's not a release date. That's not any of that stuff. We're letting those people stay focused. They're letting those people stay focused. We're on track. There's nothing to report. There's no mystery. There's no anything we're hiding or whatever. It's like we said when we announced Star Citizen Direct, we're trying to stay out of everybody's way and let them focus and let them do the work that they're here to do, which is make the game.

In the video Huckaby did leave open the possibility the game will not launch in 2026. This year's record sales may have taken some of the pressure off of needing to launch the game in 2026. But I can't imagine Squadron 42 can realistically be delayed too much longer.