Star Citizen Hits $41 million In Crowd-Funding, Won't Sell Out To Facebook

If you were afraid that Star Citizen was getting too big for its own good and that the game's ambitions were reaching unforeseen heights that might capture the attention of billion-dollar corporations and eventually get bought out by Facebook so Zuckerberg can pretend to control the galaxy with his own Facebook-logo'd dreadnaught class star destroyer, think again.

Blue's News picked up comments from RSI's Chris Roberts, the head honcho over Cloud Impreium Games' upcoming AAA crowd-funded title, Star Citizen, where Roberts assured gamers in a not to the community that they would not become sellouts. Roberts stated that...

“Now to answer the myriad forum threads that popped up worrying about the possibility of Cloud Imperium being acquired by another, bigger company – don’t worry! We have no plans nor interest in following this path! We don’t need to go to anyone with deep pockets to make OUR dream a reality. To mass-produce hardware like the Rift, you need an outlay of hundreds of millions of dollars. Luckily our ships are digital so we have hardly any cost of goods, just the cost of developing the universe of Star Citizen and running servers that Star Citizen’s universe will be simulated on. Thanks to the generosity of the Star Citizen community we have these two things covered.”

Why did the community get so worried about Star Citizen getting bought out after recently hitting $41 million in crowd-funding? Well, it follows behind the recent news of the Kickstarted virtual reality device, the Oculus Rift, being picked up by Facebook for $2 billion.

This has led tons of gamers to become completely paranoid of every other crowd-funded project becoming prime bait for a larger corporation to step in and scoop them up like some sort of flavored ice cream from the local dairy market.

Roberts, however, has big plans for Star Citizen, though. Some of those plans includes using the $41 million stretch goal to bring in a specialized procedural content generation team to make and create worlds that are both distinct and creatively unique. This means that there will be more planets to land on, more places to visit and more ways to truly engage the game's world as a citizen of the stars.

So far, the only playable module that has made its way out into the public backer space is the hanger module. The dogfighting module is expected to go live soon enough, which will allow players to battle it out in their newly available star fighters and see how well the game's physics and destruction mechanics handle in the CryEngine.

After the dogfighting module goes live the team will slowly start rolling out more playable segments of the game until they have something large and playable. The game is expected to be finished at some point in 2015 and it's also expected to be the biggest AAA independent title coming out next year. I don't doubt it.

You can check out the rest of Robert's address to the community in the latest developer video below, or you can pay visit to the official website to learn more about the game.

Will Usher

Staff Writer at CinemaBlend.