Since CIG is a UK company, the studio is required to share its fiscal filings, and so it has with the Star Citizen developer’s group financial report through December 2020, which has a number of interesting tidbits on the studio’s spending.
A thread on the Star Citizen Refunds subreddit has plucked some of the more outstanding expenditure by the studio, including £1,007,559 in paid dividends to shareholders, £2,064,144 in the purchase of “intangible assets,” and the purchase of a 25% stake in Turbulent Media Inc. totaling £826,657, which readers will recall was made a partner with CIG in November 2020. The full report can be downloaded for your perusal.
In related Star Citizen news, we have something of a follow-up to the story of a UK player who got his refund from CIG. Another Redditor highlights some text from an email he received when he followed the same process to get his refund. The email reads in part:
“Star Citizen is a community-funded online video game project which was launched in early development in 2012 and moved into (playable Alpha) Early Access in 2016. Since then, regular patches, for several years now issued quarterly, have improved, and continue to consistently expand and improve the game’s playable environments and functionality.”
This could potentially explain how CIG was able to pay over £1M in dividends to shareholders despite not having formally released a game; recall in September 2017 when Chris Roberts himself called alpha 3.0 the game’s early access release, at least conceptually:
“With 3.0, the game is moving into a phase akin to Early Access. 3.0 is the first time you’ll have some of the basic game loops and mechanics.”
