BoredGamer

Star Citizen, Squadron 42 & Theatres of War News, Guides, Videos & Gameplay by BoredGamer

Is Star Citizen’s Funding Slowing Down?

Star Citizen recently had a massive ship sale and in game event Fleet Week it’s seem as one of the most important events for Star Citizen financially each year along with CitizenCon and the IAE.

2020 was a ridiculous year for Star Citizen Funding with almost $79 million (78,991,728) being raised from ship/digital sales.

2021 hasn’t raised as much month for month, nor did it beat the Fleet Week sale from the previous year.

Today I wanted to talk about how the most recent Fleet Week stacks up and is funding winding down for Star Citizen?

Firstly Fleet Week this year was a massive success compared to 2020 in regards to accessibility, stability and playability of Star Citizen.

2020 had massive server issues which meant players couldn’t log on to play, the game had regular server and client crashes and there were a heap of other problems.

Star Citizen in 2021 still is an Alpha and has a load of bugs and issues BUT the servers were pretty stable, people could log on and play. The event this year had more in it adding to the Expo and UEE Fleet with the Bengal Super Carrier turning up and a Internal tour of the Mighty Javelin Destroyer along with it’s freefly and load of new ships available to tryout at the expo halls.

However the amount of funds generated is a bit lower this year.

2020’s event generated a whopping $13,045,311, this year 2021 $11,876,735.

That’s actually pretty similar, it certainly doesn’t suggest that star citizen is running out of funding steam.

I actually think that this is mostly down to not having so many new hype ships being on sale… with this year’s event only seeing the RSI Scorpius as it’s new surprise ship… and that ship although cool wasn’t a show stealer… well if you like x-wing and starwars maybe it was.

Another major reason I think that CI made less money was because they sold less of the larger ships… by choice…

The Idris, Javelin & Krakens all sold out within seconds when they went on sale… however it appears that they decided to sell less of these than in the 2020 event. That said I have inferred that from the numbers and sales from those days rather than have any form of statement from CI confirming that… It appears to be the case tho.

And these Capital ships of extreme value were only sold to Concierge / Chairman’s Club Members… backers that have already spent at least $1000… which is odd… as one of the main ways to get into the “club” previously would of been to buy a capital ship… now don’t get me wrong… they still sellout of any amount they list as quick as a graphics card at Currys… that’s a real life experience scalper joke for you from the UK.

But historically they have sold the same amount of Capitals again but available to purchase by anyone.

However 2021 has seen sales drop off somewhat from January – End of May in 2020 star citizen raised just over $34.1m in 2021 just over $30m, this is around a 12% drop… however it’s still a huge amount of funding and the 2nd best Jan – May month’s the game has had in funding ever.

There are other factors at work here too, CitizenCon 2019 drove a lot of early 2020 hype.

The start of the corna pandemic saw a lot of people bored at home with in some cases more disposable income as they weren’t spending it in the outside world (tho people obviously lost their jobs too)

The latest Q1 patch was a bit flat in terms of additional content as well which could have contributed to a bit of a sales fall off too from last year.

However if I was CIs marketing team… I would have seen this event as a massive success both in game and financially.

And it seems strange that CI didn’t decide to sell some more Capital Ships… the exclusivity with them being chairmans club only just doesn’t make sense to me when they can sell twice the amount to more people without players complaining.

It’s possible that this exclusivity and artificial scarcity is part of CI’s greater long term marketing plans and drives hype and fomo sales HOWEVER to it looks like they could have their cake and eat it but are only choosing to serve a relatively small slice at a time.

I am not a fan of pay2win or predatory monetization but for the most part I don’t see that as much with Star Citizen, mainly because you can get everything in game and it’s this funding that makes the game go from the realms of feature creep nightmare to genuinely great game reality.

That all said, it’s hard to argue that CI isn’t great a making money and funding their games development AND with a CitizenCon for 2021 even tho digital only could see 2021 actually being the best earning year yet for the game… 

I also want to say that the $4m for this year to last is only what 2000 capital ships to CIG… something they could of easily choose to sell and additional allotment of during this years Fleet Week.