Yet again, the unfinished alpha spaceship sandbox Star Citizen continues to break crowdfunding records despite its long years in early development: CIG’s sci-fi magnum opus has had a productive March in terms of funds raised as it saw $10M in pledge increases.
The month’s high water mark continues an overall upward-trending earnings streak for the game in the first quarter of this year, with a 40% increase in pledge dollars earned from the same time last year and a 31% increase from the previous three years, according to some napkin math by fellow blogger The Nosy Gamer.
The game has also seen an increase in new accounts created by about 5% during the first quarter as well, though Noizy once again suggests that sales highs and new account highs don’t necessarily correlate to each other. “The marketing team is concentrating on sales to long term players with a proven track record of spending a lot of money (aka ‘whales’),” he writes.
Tangentially, the fact that Star Citizen has seen an earlier crowdfunding total of over $800M has once more caused player discussion to bubble forth as players grumble about negative press coverage while others point out that raised concerns among watchers of the project and playing (and paying) fans should not be silenced. Some of the discussion on the official forums, meanwhile, raises concerns about a perceived lack of transparency or worries about a possible shift for the Quantum background simulation, which is renamed to StarSim and projected to launch as part of 1.0.
