Chris Roberts sent out a transmission earlier today : Star Citizen crowdfunding has hit $19 million. Let that sink in.
What’s $20,000,000 get contributors? A PDF format Jane’s Fighting Ships style manual to all backers, the inclusion of user operator space stations, and monthly editions of the RSI Museum. At this point you have to wonder if they’re running out of things to add.
Nope! Here’s what’s in store for the $21 mil stretch goal :
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 as the first to make contact with an entirely new alien race!
After that the money train will keep rolling :
The first is that the 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).
There are also additional running costs beyond the development to be contemplated – customer support for the growing community, the cost of delivering terabytes of data and longer term hosting servers for the dogfighting and then later the persistent universe itself.
Classic Chris Roberts. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is up for you to decide.
