The 2022 fiscal year for Star Citizen and Squadron 42 developer Cloud Imperium Games can best be described as “all the numbers were bigger”: The company’s latest financial report shows increases in developer headcount, salary payouts, overall costs, and perhaps most importantly to the company, record-breaking revenue.
Earnings rose by 32% to $114M in 2022, with the “vast majority” of revenues being attributed to new players buying pledge packages, while concept ship sales account for a “significantly smaller” fraction of revenue. The report also confirms a 6% increase in subscriptions and 21% increase in “other income,” which includes hardware and software partnerships, sponsorships, and earnings from “local incentives based upon the nature and location of [the company’s] development and production activities.”
Tangential to that point, spending rose overall in the financial year as well by 29%, with most of the company’s costs being associated with the opening of offices in Manchester and Frankfurt along with overhead costs, rising salary costs, and costs associated with buying and maintaining software and hardware. Developer head count also rose to 860 in 2022.
The report additionally provides notes about 2023, stating that CIG dedicated significant resources towards developing SQ42 in the first three quarters of the year in order to make the single-player game feature complete, as well as another headcount rise to 1,100 total workers worldwide primarily because of CIG’s acquisition of Turbulent. “2023 has not been an inexpensive year but we have a had a great – record-breaking again – end to the year and the targeted investments we have made have been focused upon our goals,” the report notes.
It all closes by claiming that 2022’s balance sheet “moved little […] despite a very successful year, and [funds] remain earmarked for the future activities planned and required to push the games forward to the commercial launch.”
