Getting subscriber details for multiplayer and MMO titles out of companies can often be like pulling teeth out of an alligator’s mouth with a pair of tweezers while it’s doing a death roll. One intrepid follower of Star Citizen, however, has managed to pull just such a trick using publicly available information to collect backer numbers for the in-development sandbox.
Redditor NightNord created a script that fetched openly accessible data from the Spectrum forums with the intent of gaining insight into CIG’s funding structure. According to the collection of information, about 75% of registered forum accounts are non-backers while there are 720K total backers and 34K subscribers. Of those backers, around 62K are concierge-level and over 142 have supported the game to the tune of about $10,000 or have high referrals, while the maximum average pledge per backer runs in the mid to upper $300 range.
NightNord does point out that there is some “weirdness” since the data comes from Spectrum, such as accounts with no handle and concierge members that are not backers, but overall the scraped details seem to be within reasonable error limits. The Reddit post features further details, including links to a searchable database (which doesn’t store cookies or track visitors) as well as script sources and raw database files.
