In this week's Letter from the Chairman, Cloud Imperium Games have announced a new corporate investment in the company. As part of this announcement they have released the financial information for their global operation from 2012 to 2017.

In addition to this, CIG have finally opened up the development roadmap for Squadron 42 - which indicates a Beta phase starting mid-2020 and considering that SC and SQ42 share common elements, this could be a decent indication of where the MMO portion sits on the timeline.

After 5 years, they surely must be nearing some form of completion? The Star Citizen development roadmap has such items as refinaries and physical inventories scheduled for Q2 of 2019. I didn't see anything in the likes of "final QA" or final anything really. I'm really intrigued to see this thing in action because from all I've heard it sounds amazing on paper. I guess if Below can take 5 years to come out ..but then again Below probably didn't have the amount of funding behind it? Not sure if you can even compare one development cycle to another.

And here i thought SQ42 was getting a release early next year....

I probably buy this at some point if it ever hits steam in a stable beta version/nearly complete.

@humanity: The roadmaps are a reflection of their internal JIRA task tracking so it's a realistic view of what's ahead. That being said the SC roadmap only covers the next 4 quarters so there is a lot beyond that.

Are the columns the Total Pledges since the beginning, or just for that year?

Per year

And it continues.

It was great to get Squadron 42 roadmap although I'm much more interested in Star Citizen PU. I guess following both roadmaps and by testing SC PU releases gives quite good idea how both projects are progressing and what kind of changes can be expected in every releases.

It is good to see them giving time the release requires. There are still many big changes coming, like the new flight model, so expecting the release in 2020 would sound quite optimistic. Hopefully the release would happen 2021 at earliest.

@spacegg: Imagine backing a Kickstarter with an initial target release date of 2014, and then having the game come out 7 years after that original target date.

This "game" looks like the biggest scam in history

I'm one of them. I understand that backers who wanted just a simple "modern Wing Commander" as originally planned, are disappointed but hopefully those backers has refunded long time ago already. The scope grew greatly and that affected of course to schedule as well so the initial target date doesn't mean much anymore.

I'm personally very happy that we get much more than originally planned. Squadron 42 and Star Citizen PU are both so enormous and complex that expecting a release in 2020 woud be too early in my opinion. There are still some big changes coming, NPCs needs to learn them, balancing, etc.

I wonder, do they have any incentive at all to stop producing the game before there's a massive backlash ? Like, a normal game will eventually run out of funds or have top brass demanding a product to cash out their investment at some point, but this is just a company having a bigger revenue stream than they will probably ever have. Why would they want to stop that ? The only reason I can think of that would push them towards finishing it would be if they think they will make even more money once it's "done".

Just the other day I was on the Xbox, on the YouTube app and typed 'will Star Citizen ever come out?' I was curious because it feels like Half-Life 3, the only difference being that they keep putting out videos of content, and yet no real final release. It'll either be an extremely huge ambitious game, or one of the biggest disappointments to those that bought into it or even had a small inkling of interest in it at some stage in its development. I really hope it's not a scam and becomes one of the most impressive space sims (if that's what I can call it) to ever be created. It almost seems like it's going too big for its own good, as in, impressive in scope, but broken in many ways.

Additional to videos about development, design etc. they are releasing versions for testing regularly; tens of version on test server and big release four times a year plus quality-of-life patches on live server.

They release Monthly Reports and other documents (like "IFCS and Flight Physics") for those who are interested to follow development more closely.

Pretty interesting interview with Chris Roberts. Nothing too shocking for those who has followed the project for all these years.

VentureBeat: Star Citizen interview — Why Chris Roberts raised another $46 million to finish sci-fi universe

I think it'll always be a work in progress. They've promised backers so much along the line that they can't, in good faith, push something out that may short-change them.

True even given another decade and near limitless funds I don't think they could ever deliver on a product that lives up to even half of what they have promised.

True, but I think this applies only with Star Citizen PU (MMO) and not with Squadron 42 (SP). A release shouldn't be end of the project but just other MMOs Star Citizen keeps getting developed until its death.

Which features you think the project will not going to have anytime soon?
Which features are you looking forward most?

Here is list of project's Stretch Goals.

I started writing a reply, but instead it turned into a bloody blog post (which I have posted now). I'm eagerly waiting for this game. The money sorta makes sense in where it is going, it seems like a ridiculous dev cycle because we're not used to seeing it from "I have an idea for a game" to "welp the scope crept up way too hard and now we're committed to this behemoth." I'm going to remain optimistic.

@creigz:

I think most of the backers should probably do what you are doing. It would be recommendable for only those who are very dedicated to file bug reports and give constructive feedback to spend more time with the game.

Fortunately CIG has made it very easy to follow a progress of the development and testing releases is one of the best way to do it. Weekly videos and written materials gives even more deep look in the development.

Today in AtV we hopefully will hear some more about upcoming flight model.

Ah yes! That is true! I haven't watched many of those recently, been super busy however I like that CIG is being as transparent as possible outside of publishing financial reports which people seem to think they're entitled to - they're not btw.

Also on the note of how I am playing, most of my Org does the same thing which is nice because we all get to experience that together.

Skipping information is not a bad idea considering it makes upcoming patches much more interesting :). Yeah, they were not entitled to publish those numbers but it was a good move from them.

It is nice to know people behind the game. We know people who are working on different aspects of the game which not common among AAA-game developers. It is even possible to meet those people face to face in different occasions like Bar Citizen meetings, game conferences, office tours, etc.