Cosmic pyramid scheme: gamers donated $750 million to Star Citizen development, and the game is no closer to release

Star Citizen art. Source: Cloud Imperium Games

Cloud Imperium Games promises to release Star Citizen - a space MMO with such ambitious ideas and mechanics that gamers willingly donate money for its development, which has lasted for more than 12 years and looks more and more like a fraud.

Here's What We Know

Star Citizen has reached another record high as Cloud Imperium Games has raised more than $750 million for the game and its single-player spin-off Squadron 42, with $50 million raised in the last six months. If this pace of funding continues, the MMO will have raised $1bn by 2027, but there's nothing to indicate that the game will be ready by then.

In October, insider Tom Henderson published a major investigation in which he quoted several Cloud Imperium Games employees as saying that the studio is in complete chaos and confusion about how to proceed, and that the money donated by gamers is being spent not on Star Citizen development, but on unnecessarily luxurious offices, Hollywood actors' fees, and the trappings of the lavish lives of Chris Roberts and his fellow executives. Moreover, many employees are confident that the studio will close without bringing the project to release.

Star Citizen has long raised a lot of questions and every year they become more and more. Of course, the game is available in early access format and it has 5.4 million registered users, but the real cost of its development is certainly not hundreds of millions of dollars.

Source: PC Gamesn