$19 Million…..and counting

10 days after crossing the $18 Million funded mark.. Star Citizen has crossed over the $19 million mark!

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That’s insane.  That means that CIG has (almost) completely funded a AAA title, in less then a year…without any money from a publisher or investment firm.  CIG continues to set records for crowdsourced fundraising.. that I’m not sure if anyone will be able to match/beat.

In his announcement article, Chris let’s us know that the first episode of RSI Museum will air next month (with a look at Freelancer)..which will be handy, I picked Freelancer up on GOG the other day.. and can’t remember how to play..so I’m hoping they recap the controls.

We also get our $21 Million goal announced:

Salvage Mechanic: Salvage isn’t an aside: it’s a career, with its own mechanic, story tie-ins and universe-shaping endgames. Search the galaxy for a host of valuable and interesting secrets using both the flight and FPS components. Discover the secrets of the ancient Hadesians, locate valuable components and cargo… or go down in history the first to make contact an entirely new alien race!

Chris goes on to explain that $21 Million is not the end of the fund raising.  Because of other costs (Paypal, credit card fees, kickstarter fees, and now server costs for bandwidth transfers), the $20 Million development funding, is actually closer to $23 Million in total funds.

The first is that goal of achieving $20M in development funding will actually be reached approximately at $23 million in funds raised. This is because we display the gross amount of funds received, but out of this we had to pay Kickstarter (approx. 10% of funds raised), Paypal/Credit card providers (approx. 4-5%), we have to reserve the fulfilment costs of the physical goods you have pledged for (over $1M right now) and finally the costs of building and maintaining the RSI site (which is a significant but very worthwhile investment, more so as some of the planned features like “organizations” rolls out).

I firmly believe that all our ‘stretch’ goals so far, were pre-planned as part of the normal development process.  Now that we’ve been given what seems to be the final of those stretch goals…it opens up a lot of possibilities for getting actual stretch goals.  In true CIG fashion, Chris Roberts has kicked part of the decision for the post $21 Million era over to the Community for input (there’s a poll at the bottom of the announcement, please take the time to respond).

  1. Take the funds raised counter down after $23 million (mission achieved!)
  2. Have the funding counter display the amount towards the current stretch goal / feature, not the total amount once we reach $23M.
  3. Keep it up through development and continue to offer stretch goal rewards in addition to extra features and development milestones.
I’m going to vote for 3, I’d like to see what kind of goals can be added – hopefully they’ll draw some community input for new goals too (realistic ones, obviously).
The last bit in the announcement, probably would have been worth it’s own post from CIG.  It’s a couple of pictures of the concept art, for a female explorer.  Pay careful attention to the amount of skin shown:
Femexplorer
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Yup, at least initially…no chain mail bikini equivalent space suit.  I think this will be a nice thing for anyone wanting to play a female character (whether they’re female or not).  It looks like the default will be ‘respectable’ attire (or, down right badass, if you will).  It’ll be interesting to see how the available wardrobe options evolve as the game develops.  I’m sure some of the ‘more skin than common sense’ outfits will make it in, but, hopefully they’ll be the minority.
All in all, a very good day for Star Citizen information.  Looking forward to the next million dollars.. let’s see if we can do it in less than 10 days, okay?