Star Citizen Has Amassed Over $600 Million In Crowdfunding Amid Layoffs

Back in June, we reported that Star Citizen had managed to rake in $590 million in crowdfunding since development started on the game over a decade ago. This week, the still-in-development sci-fi space sim has hit another crowdfunding milestone when it broke the $600 million crowdfunding mark. As of this writing, Cloud Imperium Games has amassed a total of $600,578,063 in crowdfunding from over 4,000,000 backers.

Pledges surged over the weekend following the release of the CitizenCon 2953 Digital Goodies Pack that offers a handful of exclusive in-game items for $35 a pop. It’s worth mentioning that some of those items have yet to be created and will be built live on the CitizenCon floor with the help of player input and won’t be delivered until later this year.

While some players had no qualms about buying the digital bundle as soon as it came out, others are less willing to throw money into what are essentially more promises from the devs. These players have gone on Reddit to complain about what they’re calling a greedy move on CIG’s part with some calling for the community to boycott real-money transactions until the Pyro system goes live, which is expected sometime later this year.

The fact that the studio is currently laying off QA testers doesn’t exactly help CIG’s case. There’s speculation that the layoffs are presumably part of the studio’s plans to transfer QA testing responsibilities to Turbulent following CIG’s acquisition of the Canadian studio back in July. The number of employees affected by the layoffs is still unclear.