Year in Review
“Don’t drive Angry!”
Phil Connors (Bill Murray), Groundhog Day 1993
In some ways last year felt like we were stuck just like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day repeating the same cycles as 2020; just when we thought we were seeing light at the end of the tunnel with the COVID-19 pandemic, new variants emerged to send cases skyrocketing again and communities back into lockdown and other safety measures. The world grew increasingly weary and fatigued from the toll of both the pandemic and the necessary measures to keep people as safe as possible. And even as a large part of the world is starting to return to normal, the specter of a new potential variant that can evade the vaccines and is more transmissible haunts us. Hopefully with readily available vaccines in most countries and a certain degree of built-in protection from prior infections, COVID will continue to transition to an endemic disease, something that certainly is not great, but not nearly as deadly as before, a virus that we can get on with our lives and live with just like the common Flu or Cold.
Because of the ups and downs of last year, we are only just starting to get back to the office. The first studio where it became possible to start working together in person, at any scale, was our UK studio in Manchester, where I have been spending a lot of time since last fall. I have been working with the Squadron 42 team side-by-side in the office as we focus on finishing and polishing the content and features of what will be an epic narrative adventure. Our offices in Frankfurt, Austin, and Los Angeles are only just starting to return to the office now that the local authorities have deemed it safe enough to lift various requirements. At the very beginning of the pandemic, we were proud of how we transitioned seamlessly to a work-from-home environment, but as the situation dragged on, it became clear that we were missing the benefits of spontaneous collaboration and team building that come from working in person, near each other. The time I have spent with the Squadron team in the UK has only reinforced this, as the ability to walk over to someone’s desk and see the issue or having a conversation in passing about a problem or a creative thought, makes an enormous difference to progress. When everyone is working remotely it becomes more of a slog to problem solve on the fly, or easily get or give feedback, and you end up with far more meetings / video calls. In our internal tracking we found that we had six times as many meetings when everyone was working from home than when we were in the office. I personally felt the difference in our release cadence; it took us a little longer to get each patch out than before, and it became harder to solve or fix bugs which hung around longer than previously. I have also seen the trend in the industry as a whole, with pretty much any large title being delayed, or in some unfortunate cases released before they should have been. For this reason, despite our ability to work fully remote, we are focused on getting people back together, working with each other side by side for extended periods. Going back to the office does not mean a return to the old work patterns and policies, as the extended lockdowns, combined with working remotely for two years has given us new insights into work life balance for our staff. We have altered our global work policy to allow for flexi-hours and a hybrid of in person and work from home, depending on both an employee’s and manager’s needs, with emphasis on being cognizant of our employees’ life situations.
Despite the challenges of the last year, I am proud of how much we accomplished in 2021. In fact, looking back at the year in review, I am amazed at the amount of content and features we delivered to our players. In January of last year, the community was able to play the first iteration of the XenoThreat Incursion, our first dynamic event that players praised for bringing together the pieces of Star Citizen for a thrilling server-wide encounter. While only our first iteration, this event already showed glimpses of the full promise of the Persistent Universe. In April of 2021, we released Alpha 3.13: Underground Infamy and delivered drive-in caves and sinkholes, planet tech improvements, ship-to-station docking, and more. With Invictus Launch Week, we opened the doors of the Javelin for the first time to let people take a walking tour of the mighty UEE destroyer, and brought the Bengal into orbit to showcase our biggest capital ship yet in the ’verse.
However, we really started to hit our stride in the second half of 2021 with the release of Alpha 3.14: Welcome to Orison, when we finished the Stanton system by launching the gas giant Crusader and the landing zone of Orison. Accompanying that were a host of Quality of Life improvements and our first iteration of Volumetric Clouds.
Then, with Alpha 3.15: Deadly Consequences, we introduced v0 of our Medical Gameplay, Looting, Bombing, and Personal Inventory, just to name a few new features. Coupled with our continuing improvements in performance and stability, and the drastic reduction in server crashes (which usually manifest themselves to a user as the infamous 30K error; connection lost to the server), Star Citizen the game was finally starting to come together in a way it had never done before.
And as great as our 2020 year was in terms of engagement and sentiment, the back half of 2021 was at another level. We saw more people than ever before flocking to Star Citizen, carried in on waves of good will and excitement from current players asking their friends to join, and from complete newcomers awed by the spectacle of Crusader, the gameplay of XenoThreat, and the opportunities from new features like Personal Inventory and Looting. And to cap off the year, when we launched Alpha 3.16: Return to Jumptown, veteran players returned to see our fresh, new take on the classic Jumptown emergent battlegrounds and were amazed at just how far the game had progressed.
Our wins in 2021 set us up for an absolutely historic start to 2022. So far, we have blown past all our projections on new players joining the ‘verse. In fact, this year, we have more than doubled our rate of New User acquisition, and with the recent launch of Alpha 3.17: Fueling Fortunes, we are seeing over two thousand new players a day joining the ‘verse. Our DAU (Daily Active Users) has grown by over 50% since the numbers I shared in my last Letter from the Chairman in December 2020, and with this latest patch, we are enjoying double the daily login traffic of our last April patch launch. We are enjoying MAU (Monthly Active Users) which is well beyond the highs of 2020. And we have had nearly 1 million New Accounts created since then, and more than half a million New Pledging Players join the game. And this week, we had our 2 millionth unique player log in to play Star Citizen. We are on track this year to break 4 million total accounts, over 1 million unique logins this year, and more than $500 million in lifetime revenue.
All of this is due to the incredible support we receive from you combined with the progress we have been making in Star Citizen, which brings new curious gamers into the ‘verse. It is heartening to see the feedback and impressions from newer members of the community when they first start playing Star Citizen.
For all of those of us that have been around from the start, it is easy to take for granted a lot of the features that Star Citizen has, that no other game does. After all, we all know every feature, its bugs, and more importantly what is not done, so it can be easy to focus on the cup half empty, rather than full. But what other game has the combination of scale and detail; the ability to seamlessly go from on foot, to onboard a fully realized ship, with functioning components and a livable interior you can move around, take off towards a twinkling pin prick of light in the sky, up through clouds into the blackness of outer space, only to get intercepted by a group of pirates looking to liberate your cargo from you, best them in an intense dogfight and continue your journey towards the twinkling light in the distance… that becomes another planet, that you can enter it’s atmosphere and land on, lower your ramp and walk out into a bustling city or beautiful river bank nestled in trees to harvest some alien fruit? All without loading screens, and rendered in incredible millimeter detail in either first person or third person? There are other games that have some of these elements, but none that have everything with the level of fidelity that Star Citizen offers.
Sometimes it isn’t a bad thing to look back and appreciate just how far we have come. We get a lot of flak for timelines and schedules, especially when the original crowdfunding campaign is brought up, but the game that is being built today is a completely different and far more expansive and immersive game than I pitched almost ten years ago. Back then there were no fully realized planets rendered with incredible detail that you could go anywhere on; planets were only visitable if they had a crafted landing location, and even then there was a debate whether they would be explorable in first person or if they would be more like the landing zones in Freelancer and Privateer, where you could click between a few locations to buy or sell goods or pick up missions in a bar. There was no conception of a first-person system that is as tactile and fully formed as we are making today, nor a vehicle simulation that had physical components and the level of systemic functionality that we are striving for. The game being built today is a game that encompasses many; It is a dogfighting spacesim, it is a first person shooter, it is a trading game, a resource collecting game, a resource management game, an adventure game, a survival game and a social game. Star Citizen is a universe sim. It is a game for everyone, as in real life there are many different paths to walk, and success is defined by what makes you happy. Do you want to prove your abilities as a fearsome combat pilot? The game has that for you, but equally if you just want to quietly mine minerals and make your fortune, or hang out in Landing Zones, or find a corner of the galaxy that no one else has found... all of these are options in the Sandbox that Star Citizen is. To do this right, at the scale that will allow millions of people to play together takes time and money, and with your support and patience, we are able to build a game that I do not think any other publisher could afford to do or would be crazy enough to commit to.
Many that have financially supported Star Citizen do not care about profits or quarterly earnings, they just want the best and biggest game possible, one that lives up to their expectations and dreams. While that is no small task, it is something that is far easier for myself and everyone at CIG to put all our effort into, as it is a privilege to be challenged artistically and supported financially in this manner, and I am immensely grateful to have so many people put so much faith in all of us.
THANK YOU!
Road to 4.0
Back in December 2017, Star Citizen Alpha 3.0 was published to the live servers after a unified push from our developers around the globe. This monumental patch introduced our brand new procedural planetary technology and the first planetary bodies you could land on and go anywhere across the surface of the three moons of Crusader. It also included a new mission system, improved shopping, new cargo mechanics, and doubled our server player cap. To date Star Citizen 3.0 was probably the biggest incremental jump in gameplay and content, which is why we incremented the Alpha designation from 2.X to 3.X, and it was a whole eight months between 2.6.3 and 3.0.
This year, we find ourselves on a similar path with three huge technology initiatives that will fundamentally change the experience and immersion into Star Citizen. The first of these is what we are calling Persistent Entity Streaming (PES) which is the foundational tech that enables Server Meshing (SM). PES is the hardest part of the work needed for SM and is the one that has required the most engineering. It fundamentally changes how we record state in the Universe and delivers a level of persistence that you just don’t see in other games, whether they are MMOs or even single-player experiences. Up until now, all persistence in the game has been tied to a player’s inventory; ships you own or items you hold physically or in the virtual inventories of items you own. If you’ve physically attached an item inside your vehicle, say a rifle to a weapons rack, when you log out or stow the vehicle it will remember all the attached items and anything in that vehicle’s virtual inventory. However, if you drop or place something loosely, even inside a ship you own, it won’t be associated with any player inventory. So, when you log out (or if the server crashes), the item will not be there when logging on or re-joining. With PES we are recording the state of every dynamic object in the game, irrelevant of whether it is “owned” or held by a player. That means that you could drop a gun or a med pen in a forested area on Microtech and return several days later after logging out to find the gun or med pen still there (assuming another player didn’t grab them!).
The technology to do this at scale for a universe as large and detailed as ours, for millions of players is no small feat of engineering. We have been working towards this since 2019 when we debuted Server Side Object Container Streaming (SSOCS), which allows a server to only stream in and simulate only a portion of our universe, which is necessary if you are going to have multiple servers simulate different parts of the universe.
The development has not been without road bumps; we had to change our plans for how we would persist the state of the universe when we realized that the backend relational database we were planning on using with a host of services, which we had collectively dubbed “iCache” would likely not be able to have low latency at the scale we needed for the number of concurrent players we will need to support in the future. We pivoted to using a Graph database at the start of 2021, taking a different approach to the services and cache which we outlined in a virtual presentation during last year’s CitizenCon. The current architecture uses what we call the Replication Layer, which is a scalable data cache that tracks the state of all dynamic objects in the universe, runs in the cloud, and communicates with the cloud-based graph database, which we call the Entity Graph. This ultimately is the final authority on the state of all dynamic objects in our universe. The Replication Layer, which is a separate service and in its final form will have multiple worker nodes based on player concurrency, allows us to track and communicate the state of the universe in real-time, and separates the simulation from state. This is especially important for scalability as clients do not need to wait for a server to simulate to see state change around them, as both clients and servers communicate their results to the Replication Layer, which is then reflected to all clients. Because the Replication Layer service does not need to simulate, it can communicate state change to clients at a fixed frequency and is not bound to simulation time, which should lead to a better experience for players. For PES to work both the Entity Graph and Replication Layer need to be functional. In terms of engineering, this was the biggest technical challenge and required a fundamental reworking of how the game handles authority and state change of entities. In addition, a whole host of new online services were needed to support the Replication Layer and the Entity Graph. To support PES we needed to create 12 new services. For Server Meshing, only 4 more services are currently planned, so you can see just how much foundational tech for SM is in PES. As part of this we switched to gRPC which is an open-source, scalable Google sponsored data protocol for online communication. The nice aspect of using tech like this is that it is designed to scale (just imagine how many concurrent users Google must handle) and there are lots of available third-party tools and code, compared to creating an internal custom protocol.
All this means that getting Persistent Entity Streaming to work would require the bulk of the tech we need to make Server Meshing viable. I am happy to report after 16 months of extremely focused work by 18 engineers, 3 dedicated QA, and 4 producers spread between CIG and Turbulent (who are managing the back-end data base in the cloud and its related services) that the team were able to demonstrate Persistent Entity Streaming working last week in our weekly internal Persistent Universe Update meeting.
Paul Reindell, Our Director of Engineering for Online Tech, spun up a server, populated the Entity Graph to its initial state along with the Replication Layer (which is essentially an in memory cache for the universe state/backend database that exists in the cloud to make sure read/writes to the database do not bottleneck servers and clients), then connected a client, placed down a series of small objects like cans on the surface of Aberdeen, along with an 890 Jump and an Anvil Arrow. He then killed the server and the client. The server was restarted, we did not populate the Entity Graph (as it had been previously seeded on the initial startup), and then connected a client, warped to Aberdeen and everything was there as he placed it. This was a huge milestone as the state of the universe was recorded to the backend database and then when he restarted the server it just connected to the Replication Layer, which had initialized itself from the database (the Entity Graph) and continued with the universe at the state he left it.
That may not sound revolutionary to some of you, but I can tell you it was akin to Neil Armstrong taking “one small step.” Once Persistent Entity Streaming comes online, Star Citizen will be a different universe. Full persistence will provide over the coming years an experience in gaming that most other online games do not provide; a universe you can escape to, that is affected by your and other players’ actions, with the state being dynamic and persistent. Crash land on a planet, and your shipwreck will persist, while you forage for food and water to survive, and perhaps wood to make a fire to keep warm. log off and come back to what you built. Or, perhaps once you have been rescued, another player will stumble on the wreck of your old ship and the long-extinguished campfire. Find a corner of the galaxy to make your own, collect resources and import material to build your outpost, decorate or arrange your hangar or home how you like.
With this tech in place, Server Meshing becomes possible, as the Replication Layer/Entity Graph is the universe state that clients and servers write and read from. Because we have decoupled state from simulation, this allows us to have many Server Nodes all communicating with the Replication Layer, responsible for simulation of focused areas in the Universe, which allows us to scale our ability to simulate the overall universe, as a server is no longer responsible for every non-player entity, regardless of location or number. This means that instead of a server dropping to five frames per second due to simulation load, we can just spin up another, and then another to spread the simulation load and keep the update tick rate high. This is the ultimate goal of Dynamic Server Meshing and what we are working towards.
Now, a fundamental change to how state is recorded, especially one that affects every dynamic object, not just a select few, is going to have a lot of edge cases and issues we have not come across yet or foreseen.
2022 TESTING AND RELEASE CADENCE
Because of this, we are going to be approaching 3.18 differently than our previous releases. We are anticipating that 3.18 will require a much longer time in the Evocati/PTU phase than our previous releases, due to the fundamental change in how the game tracks state. We know we will also need testing at scale, as in our experience we see different issues when we go from internal testing to Evocati to PTU wave 1, then wave 2 and so on. Players do crazy things, and lots of players creates lots of crazy cases we had not considered, which expose bugs and edge cases. Our guess is that it may be as long as three months in the PTU stage, but it is hard to predict. For instance, will the universe turn into a nightmare version of WALL-E because everyone just throws empty boxes on the ground, or dumps the 10 AI bodies they have looted in New Babbage’s Commons? We are working on what we call a Density Manager to manage the objects that get recorded and clean up the lower priority ones (for instance, discarded empty bottles or cans) when too many are in one area, but I suspect we will also have to implement AI Janitors and perhaps even crime stats for littering in Landing Zones like New Babbage or ArcCorp!
As it did not make much sense to engineer the revamped physical Cargo system and Salvage for the old system, these two features have been engineered for PES (you want wrecks from player battles to stick around so you can salvage!) and will arrive with 3.18.
However, we do not want engagement and content to stall because of PES requiring longer testing, so we are planning to release a content-rich Alpha 3.17.2 patch with known stable code, new missions, new locations, and other gameplay in late June. The vast majority of players, hundreds of thousands of them in fact, are here to simply play on Live, and for them, we want to keep giving them engaging new gameplay and adventures to enjoy simultaneously while we test 3.18 at scale on the PTU.
The goal will then be to get 2-3 months of testing on 3.18 in PTU for an Alpha 3.18 release to LIVE in late Q3. I know many of you have been waiting for Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, and Persistent Entity Streaming for a long time, and I am excited to see us in the home stretch to finally bring it to you. I think 3.18 will be an amazing update that is an even bigger game-changer than 3.15 was, but we want to make sure we give it the proper time to test so we can deliver it to you at the best quality possible.
Alongside our Persistent Streaming work the Engine and Graphic teams have been making great progress on the second big technical initiative we’ve been working on the past two years; a complete replacement of our graphics engine with what we call “Gen 12”, which is multithreaded and much more efficient approach to rendering which gets the most out of modern graphics APIs like Vulkan. This allows us to utilize the modern graphics power of PCs more efficiently and not tie up the main game update loop with waiting around for draw call submissions and the like. We are looking at getting the bulk of this functionality in for the Live release of 3.18 with the release of the Vulkan functionality a little later, but hopefully by the end of the year.
This leaves us with our third large technical initiative, Server Meshing.
As you might have guessed, we will approach Server Meshing in much the same way that we are rolling out Persistent Entity Streaming. Star Citizen Alpha 4.0 will be a truly new era in Star Citizen. It will mean our final tech building block – Server Meshing – will have been delivered. The first implementation will be what we call Static Server Meshing (SSM), where each server is given a defined area to simulate, but as soon as SSM is stable we will move towards Dynamic Server Meshing with subsequent releases which will allow much more scalability as servers will not be bound by location, but instead will be distributed by load, allowing for much better simulation performance in any given area of the universe.
With 4.0, we will get our second star system, Pyro, and we begin the process of adding more and more content, gameplay, and polish, to get us to Beta. For all of us at CIG, Server Meshing and 4.0 represent taking that next big leap to populating the ‘verse with the promise of content and gameplay that will turn Star Citizen into the rich, living universe that exceeds the promise we set before us those many years ago.
Our current goal is to introduce Server Meshing and 4.0 as an early technical preview to Evocati testers in PTU at the end of Q4 this year, allowing our most ardent players to help us start testing Server Meshing so we can refine and polish it for release. But this is heavily conditioned on how well / easy the Persistent Entity Streaming roll out goes, so be warned this has a high chance of slipping into Q1 next year. Once Server Meshing starts to see real-world testing with thousands of players in PTU, we will get a better idea of how much time it will need to cook in PTU before it can make its way to LIVE. We are aiming for the end of Q1 2023, but again, we really will not know with confidence until it hits testing.
This special 2022 release cadence will not be particularly unusual to most players, if you pull back and look at it in a broad sense. We will still have 4 big end-of-quarter releases, as well as 2 big mid-quarter releases for Fleet Week in May and IAE in November. Players who are not steeped in our development process will still enjoy and experience rapid content releases every quarter, and as we get into the second half of 2022, you will see a lot more meaningful gameplay making its way into the ‘verse. With another run of XenoThreat, updates to Jumptown, new Dynamic Events, additional locations and points of interest to explore, and more patch updates, there will be no shortage of gameplay and content to experience. And by year’s end, players will be able to enjoy Persistent Streaming, Salvage, Cargo refactor, and Bounty Hunter v2 gameplay on Live.
Meanwhile, those who are following our development closest, and providing the critical service of helping us test our biggest tech, will be able to get their hands on Persistent Streaming and Server Meshing this year, as we put them into test in 3.18 and 4.0 in PTU during the summer and winter, respectively. Sometimes, the wait can be the hardest when we are closest to the finish line, but this year, I am so excited to share our release plans for our key tech building blocks, and I know many of you cannot wait to jump into PTU and start testing later this year.
Building for Longevity
It is easy to only focus on our development progress and the work we have ahead in building Star Citizen and Squadron 42 but there is another very important element of our journey that is often overlooked. Not only are we building two hugely ambitious games to rival anything released by the biggest AAA studios, but we’ve had to build the company to build the technology and make the games from scratch at the same time.
The day I stepped out on the stage at GDC, we had no formal employees, three founders in Ortwin, Sandi and myself, and a handful of people that had helped like Forrest Stephan, David Haddock and David Swofford, sometimes moonlighting from their day job (with permission of course) like Ben Lesnick, Hannes Appell, Sean Tracy and Paul Reindell and a few friends from my old Origin and Digital Anvil days like Sergio Rosas and his CGBot art outsourcing company, to create the demo and build the website.
Today we have 780 people on staff, plus an extended family of over 130 working closely with us at Turbulent in Montreal, with many more that will join us in the coming months. We have a seven-person Global Talent Acquisition team that focuses exclusively on trying to hire the best talent possible for CIG. To give you an idea of the scale of TA work, they helped us hire 168 people in 2021, and so far, this year have helped us recruit 128 people already.
In 2022, we will continue to grow in all departments, increasing our headcount to approximately 840 and bring us closer to release for Star Citizen and Squadron 42.
One challenge we have been facing is that we have nowhere near enough room at several of our studios for new hires that joined us during the pandemic. Because of this, we signed long-term leases on two offices in brand new and state of the art buildings in Manchester and Frankfurt last year.
We are now only months away from opening the two new offices, both of which will create world-class collaboration spaces and house our ever-growing team. Our new studio in the UK will deliver 90,000 sq ft of state-of-the-art creative studio space over the top three floors of Manchester Goods Yard, as well as two stages in the adjacent Manchester Studios and Bonded Warehouse complex; a dedicated motion / performance capture 4,500 sq ft stage with a suite of changing rooms, a green room, machine room, scanning room and a viewing gallery along with a smaller stage for Global Video Production which will have a dedicated set and be well set up for filming a vast array of content for Star Citizen and later on Squadron 42’s launch.
In Frankfurt we will be moving into 30,000 sq ft over two floors at the One with spectacular views high above the city skyline, which is double our current space in Frankfurt and should situate us well for any near-term growth there.
We’re also looking at the next location for our Austin studio, for potential move-in late next year, as we need more space there as well. And after this we will look to upgrade the LA studio too.
We are building long-term homes that will provide the facilities to keep the universe alive and expanding for decades to come.
CitizenCon
Shows such as CitizenCon are huge undertakings that require lots of planning, and although life is slowly returning to normal, restrictions are only now just lifting. And as cases are still largely unpredictable, we see that planning big shows may still be a bit premature. The uncertainty surrounding resumed normality has impacted our ability to plan a physical show. Traditionally, we would already be deep in planning and execution for a CitizenCon today, if we were going to hold an event this October; however, we have not been able to do so yet. It does seem many of our peers in the industry are encountering similar conundrums, as E3 only recently canceled their physical show. In addition, Los Angeles, where we would hold this year’s show tends to be very cautious and is more apt to impose restrictions on large in-person gatherings in the event of a new variant blowing up.
Because of this, combined with the huge amount of work the company is trying to deliver this year, not to mention moving 70% of the company into two new offices, we have decided not to hold a physical CitizenCon this year. We very much hope that next year we will be able to commit to an in-person event as we miss the opportunity to mix in person with all of you and be invigorated by your enthusiasm and excitement.
At the same time though, we know we could not have come this far without our community, and we are grateful for each and every one of you that has supported us along this journey. It being our 10th anniversary as a company and a community, we are going to be celebrating virtually with a virtual CitizenCon, like we did last year.
One difference to last year is that there will be no keynote gameplay demo to headline this event as this would pull valuable resources away from our game development teams that are working hard to get Persistent Streaming, Gen 12/Vulkan and Server Meshing in your hands, not to mention also delivering more of the content and gameplay that has proven so successful in bringing in new players and retaining old and new users alike.
Instead, CitizenCon will be a celebration of you, the community, with presentations and panels from our developers, to share with you the progress we are making and the near future of what you can expect from Star Citizen in the year ahead. And as I noted back in my December 2020 Letter, we are still going to be quiet on Squadron 42 until it is time to start the release campaign. And we are not quite there yet. Know that progress is coming along nicely, but we’re not quite ready to pull the curtain back on Squadron just yet.
Bar Citizen World Tour
It has been more than 2 years since we have had the opportunity to spend time with all of you in person, and while we will not be together for CitizenCon, we cannot hold out another year! For that reason, we plan to kick off a robust “Bar Citizen World Tour” this Summer, perfectly coinciding with the in-lore holiday, First Contact Day (Definitely read up on the backstory to see why this fits so nicely!). We would also like to take this perfect opportunity to coin a new out-of-game annual holiday: International Bar Citizen Day. We will celebrate this inaugural new holiday by hosting Bar Citizen events simultaneously near all our development studios in mid-June, details on the when/where coming very soon.
After that, we plan to branch out and bring the fun to events that may not be as close to our studios. Our Community Team is planning to embrace Bar Citizens around the globe with renewed vigor, bringing goodies and developers with them to greet and mingle with all of you as part of the celebration of our 10th anniversary.
Keep a close eye on Spectrum in the weeks to come, as the team will begin exploring which Bar Citizen events to attend. So, if you are hosting your own event, we want to hear from you.
Final Thoughts
While some of you will no doubt be disappointed to hear the news about no physical show and no keynote demo at CitizenCon, the team and I felt it was much more important that we focus on making development progress so that we could maintain the pace of delivery we have been hitting since Alpha 3.14.
This year is a big one for all of us on Star Citizen: You can expect to see Invictus Launch Week moving into the clouds of Crusader, the promise of Persistent Entity Streaming making its way to the ‘verse, as well as big game-changing features like Salvage, Physicalized Cargo, Bounty Hunting v2, new events and missions, enhancements to Jumptown, ships I know you’re waiting on like the Corsair, Vulture, and Hull C; as well as more Quality of Life and New Player Onboarding improvements to make Star Citizen even more playable and welcoming than it is today. And that is without mentioning Pyro and Server Meshing, which we are aggressively working towards letting you test by end of year, pending how difficult it is to get Persistent Entity Streaming stable. We think you would all rather be playing this new content than hearing about it. So, we will use our time this year to focus on development and delivering to you the tech, features, and content you are waiting for.
The developers at CIG tend to get a lot of attention, which is well deserved as it is the most talented development team I have ever worked with. But there are a lot more people beyond development at CIG - as they say, “it takes a village”!
Without our Publishing and Live-Ops team the servers would not be up 24/7 in the cloud, and you would not be able to download or play Star Citizen. Without our Quality Assurance teams tireless testing and feedback Star Citizen would be unplayable. Without the backend and web teams at Turbulent, you would not be able to log on, have a website to read news and information or a forum to participate in healthy debate on, pledge or launch Star Citizen. Without our Studio Experience Team looking after the health of our organization, there would not be a creative environment as ambitious as Star Citizen. Without our Finance and Legal teams, we could not have built a company as unique and groundbreaking as CIG. Without our Marketing and Community teams, there would not be any communication about our plans, no dazzling trailers to tease and excite about future content, and no real back and forth between the Community and CIG. Without our Customer Support and Player Experience Teams, you would not get the help you need, nor have the ability to give feedback on gameplay in a way it can be quantified. Without our IT department we would not be able to work together, whether in the office or from home, nor would we be able to compile code or create beautiful assets. Without our People department, there would be nobody that is there to hire, listen, guide and help our staff.
And without all of you, with your enthusiasm and patience, there would be no Star Citizen, Squadron 42 or Cloud Imperium Games.
As we move closer to achieving the critical milestones outlined above, we cannot help but feel an immense amount of appreciation for each and every one of you who shares in the collective dream of Star Citizen. The path ahead is more vibrant than ever, but in some ways the collective journey together, the moments and fun that people have along the way as we build Star Citizen together is as rewarding as the ultimate destination.
And that is what makes this game and community special.
From all of us at Cloud Imperium, we will see you at Bar Citizen, Digital CitizenCon and in the PTU!
