View source for Comm-Link:Letter from the Chairman - 2018-11-18

Two Hundred Million Dollars.

Wow.

The amount is the highest total for any project in the history of [[Crowdfunding campaign|crowdfunding]] and is beyond anything I could have imagined in my wildest dreams.

While the number is impressive, that is not what sets ''[[Star Citizen]]'' and ''[[Squadron 42 (video game)|Squadron 42]]'' apart.

The true celebration is one of how a community came together to enable a shared dream to come to life. How gamers from all over the world came together to finance one of the biggest and most ambitious projects ever embarked on. There is no publisher. No big conglomerate. This is all grassroots, funded by gamers for gamers.

To highlight just how global the support is, the person that took us past this milestone, Algared, hails from New South Wales in Australia and has been a backer since 2014. We have backers from 171 countries, from some of the smallest like San Marino or the Maldives to the largest like India and China. We cover the globe, pole to pole from Antarctica to Svalbard and Jan Mayen. Considering there are only 193 countries in the world, that’s an amazing number and shows how universal the appeal of ''Star Citizen'' is.

And it’s more than just the [[Crowdfunding campaign|funding]], it’s been six years of ground breaking open development, where all of you have been actively involved in what we are building.

You have watched us grow from a handful of people to a global staff of over 500, across 5 studios, 4 time zones and 3 countries. Some of the best talent in the industry is working on ''Star Citizen'' and ''Squadron 42'', most of who are gamers that are inspired by your passion to push the boundaries of what is possible.

We give you multiple updates every week and have been since the inception of the project. This year we rolled out a live roadmap for ''Star Citizen’s'' development that is linked to our internal task and scheduling system and shows the planned features and content for the next four upcoming releases of ''Star Citizen'' Alpha. This December, we will also add the roadmap for ''Squadron 42’s'' completion.

Speaking on behalf of the team, we are always amazed and humbled by the talent, imagination, creativity and passion that we see from the community. The beautiful screen shots and videos, the streamers that push the boundaries of what the game can do even in Alpha, the detailed proposals and feedback on how to make things better and the patient bug hunting so many of you do.

To reduce Star Citizen to just be about the amount raised is to do a disservice to all this. No other game shares as much information on a weekly basis, and no other game I know of is as focused on listening to and working with its community to make the best game possible. When I look around and see other games, even ones from major publishers, copying our playbook, I know we have had a positive influence on the gaming industry.

How Star Citizen is made, in public, warts and all, is part of what makes it special. It should be a no-brainer to cheer on a grassroots funded game that is literally shooting for the stars. No one is attempting to do what we are doing, in the manner we are doing it, nor being as open about as we are. Different and new can be scary, but it can also be exhilarating and rewarding. These uncharted frontiers of game development and funding, mirror the draw of the game itself; the lure of distant planets to explore, realized to an unprecedented detail and scale.