Star Citizen Nears $400 Million in Funding

Welcome to some more Star Citizen looking at the financial funding monster the project is and talking about some of it’s funding to date, new investments and some of what CIG have invested in and the Company’s Infrastructure. Star Citizen does appear to be making more month on month and year on year, it’s funding is actually speeding up significantly rather than slowing down since December 2019.

AND Recently Star Citizen OR at least it’s studio Cloud Imperium has Raised Additional $17.25M Investment from Existing Investors.

On March 27, 2020 Cloud Imperium announced that existing investors – the Calder Family Office (who had previously invested $46 million), Snoot Entertainment, and ITG Investment – have exercised a one-time option to purchase further shares in the company. The share prices reflect a discounted option price for existing shareholders that was pre-negotiated at the time of the initial investment in 2018. There were no changes to the Board composition as a result of this transaction. Chris Roberts continues to maintain full control of the Board and Group.

There are no details of the specifics of the amount of shares that changed hands there BUT we can look to the original agreement for a guesti-mate. The $46 million investment got around 10% of shares in CIGs Parent Companies.

$17.25 million is 37.5%, just over a third of that original investment and it said that it was still at the discounted price option, so you can expect another 3.5-4% of CIGs shares to now be privately owned.

This appears to have been a one time option available to those original investors that they could do within a certain period of time and they exercised that. 

So that’s new and I wanted to look at Star Citizen’s Funding overall as it Seems to be getting larger year on year as they refine marketing and entice new players into the game.

Star Citizen’s Funding Chart on the RSI Website shows over 2.5 million player accounts & $275 Million of funding BUT the total amount should be a lot more than that (Though I don’t believe the total does not really account for Refunds, I would suspect refunds to be upto 0.6% of purchases looking at similar digital goods).

Subscriptions, Investments & Other Income from things like Sponsorships are not counted in the $275m. 

As we don’t have Full Figures for 2019 and 2020 yet we will have to do a bit of a guestimate here again.

For Subs we have $14.5m by the end of 2018 and we can assume as of the end of March 2020 this is probably around $19m generated in RSI subscriptions to date.

For other we have around $29m by the end of 2018 so I am going to assume this is closer to $39m total to date given the additional 15 months.

Investments now with the $46 plus that $17.25 million for a combined total of $63.25m.

This puts my estimation of Star Citizen & Squadron 42s funding closer to $395.25m almost $400m.

There have been some Investments made by CIG.

CIG have been investing in a marketing department & setting up company infrastructure with the $46m investment helping with that, this could be one of the reasons the company has been able to generate more income BUT also this is a future investment for Squadron 42 marketing and obviously quarterly release marketing of Star Citizen’s PU.

CIG now has between 550-580 employees across 5 studios in the US Austin & LA, in the UK Manchester & Derby AND in Germany Frankfurt. Not all of those are Devs tho, there are admin, human resources, janitors in there too.

At time of recording as well there are 81 positions that CIG are looking to fill across those studios too 46 of those at the Manchester Studio.

They are also working with a major contractor Turbulent, who look after the RSI Web platform for CI.

CI traded shares with Turbulent.

“Cloud Imperium UK’s share acquisition expands and formalizes the long-running partnership between Cloud Imperium and Turbulent, who has been instrumental in assisting in the creation of Star Citizen’s online and publishing platform throughout the 7+ year relationship between the two companies”

Basically Turbulent made the interactive star map and are handling updates to the website as well as the Spectrum Forums and eventually the unification of alot of this into the game, expect some cool stuff from the website in the future is all I am saying.

CIG bought a 25% share of Turbulent and acquired 2 seats on Turbulents board.

Turbulents founders acquired 2340 shares in CI, which equates to around 0.2% of the shares.

What’s the State of CIs Board currently then?

Cloud Imperium’s Board of Directors consists of six members: Chris Roberts (Founder), Ortwin Freyermuth (Legal Counsel), Erin Roberts (Global Head of Production), and Eli Klein (an advisor for the Company). Sandi Gardiner who was previously the VP of marketing & Marc Nitsche who represents the Caulders now over $63m investment.

Chris Roberts retains full control of the Cloud Imperium Board and Group.

There are Worries over Covid-19 and how that might affect every industry in the world, tho there is an argument that entertainment and video games are something that may actually do quite well out of the new world order.

CIG have adapted quickly to working from home & are very confident. They are lucky to have the infrastructure to support remote development on the scale they are now doing it.

We could certainly see some delays in the short term AND we don’t know how it will affect funding long term, events like CitizenCon may have to be cancelled HOWEVER we may be back to a relative normal less lockdown life by October 10th when CitizenCon is supposed to be.

It will be interesting to see how effectively the studios can work from home, how funding is affected and what sort of delays we could see.

If there is lots of sick staff that could certainly cause delays ALSO there are some staff that are not devs that would I suppose be unable to do their jobs.

Another plus for 2020 tho is that the Crytek Lawsuit has now Ended with CIG and Crytek covering their own legal fees, which looks to be the settlement. This effectively has CIG left paying their $1m bill themselves BUT the lawsuit can’t come back in the future. 

Star Citizen still plan to release major quarterly patches for the Alpha PU and on the Roadmap for Squadron 42… well the Roadmap for Squadron 42 has been paused while they come up with a better solution for showing progress to the backers that is less “linear”.

Last we heard CI were planning a Feature Complete Beta for Q3 2020 BUT that would be internally for them… don’t expect access to that Beta! 

Even with delays to Alpha 3.9 and no release dates for SQ42 yet, It doesn’t look like funding is drying up for the project even in uncertain times. Star Citizen is a beast of a project and something that I very much love to be along for the ride of as a backer and with my Youtube Channel such as it is.