In a letter just before the end of the year, Chairman Chris Roberts addresses the Star Citizen community. In it, he celebrates some financial milestones, but also outlines a preview of what you can expect in the space MMO in 2023. We have summarized the most exciting information.
A million players
Despite the long development phase and a release that is still a long way off, Star Citizen is growing rapidly. As Chris Roberts reports, in 2022 over a million players logged in and played a total of over 46 million hours. Compared to 2021, this is growth of 50 percent and a doubling of the number of players from 2019.
Incidentally, out of this million players, around 240,000 play on a monthly basis. Here, too, there are about a third more players than in 2021. Incidentally, the strongest month was in May with 400,000 monthly active users when update 3.17 was launched. A total of 800,000 new accounts were created in 2022.
The great success of the unfinished MMO is partly due to the very active community. Colleague Michael Sonntag introduced you to three exciting community projects:
Star Citizen
Here’s how much fun you can have with an incredibly unfinished game
Over 100 million revenue
Not only the number of players, but also the annual income climbed to a record level. Again Financial report for 2021 now showed that Cloud Imperium was able to increase revenue by 14 percent compared to the previous year and thus break the 100 million mark.
The report cites the new players who spent money on starter packs as the main reason for this growth. These grant access to the Star Citizen Alpha. Purchases of in-game ships and other items also increased. Recurring players were also not entirely uninvolved here.
What is planned for 2023
In addition to the record reports, Roberts also gave a small outlook for 2023. That’s how it should be Patch 3.18 will be played in the new year on the LIVE environment and bring the Persistent Entity Streaming feature (short: PES). With the system, all player-based interventions in the world, such as bodies that have been shot down, wrecks or items left behind, should remain in the game world instead of disappearing at some point.
The patch is currently in the first wave on the test servers and is being put through its paces. Once the PES system is operational and mature enough, it should be Separate game server and replication layer walk:
The next step will be to separate the replication layer (RL), the in-memory cache that stores all dynamic object states, from the game server and have scalable RL workers that handle the state changes between the different game clients, servers and communicate with the RL. […] Once that is done we will be able to have multiple game servers communicating with the RL (similar to how multiple game clients now communicate with the RL) allowing Star Citizen to have multiple servers simulating the state of the universe what we call Server Meshing (SM).
Chris Roberts
Server meshing is then tackled in several phases and versions. The aim of this development step is to increase the player capacities per server and to connect the Star Citizen universe with other star systems. The Pyro system is supposed to start with this.
41:35
10 Years of Star Citizen – What Really Happened?
In addition to this major project, 2023 should also smaller content and features be implemented, which we have listed for you in bullet points:
- new item resource system in ships
- Bounty hunting with a full tracking system
- persistent hangars with cargo elevators
- greatly improved interaction system
- FPS-Scanning
- new star map
- deeper combat AI
According to current planning, all of these steps should be completed by the end of the new year. Meanwhile, the GameStar forum is skeptical as to whether these time frames are realistic. Here, users expect a shift and the achievement of the above goals in about two years.
No comment function?
Due to the high moderation effort, we have moved the Star Citizen topics to the forum. There you can discuss as usual.
Here is the forum thread
