The development of Star Citizen has cost almost $200 million

Creating the spacesim of our dreams (which is likely to remain a dream) - i.e. Star Citizen - is costing its developers a lot of money judging by the lengthy financial document that Cloud Imperium Games shared several weeks ago. In November we reported that Star Citizen has passed the $200 million milestone in crowdfunding - and the developers have spent almost the whole amount. To be precise, the development has cost more than $193 million.

In 2017 only, Cloud Imperium Games has spent almost $50 million and more than half of this sum was dedicated to salaries. In the graph below you can see the distribution of costs across different fields. The most curious case is the fact that CIG has been spending a lot less on contracted developers in the recent years compared to 2015 - it was the year when both contracted devs and full-time employees received the similar sums. The situation has drastically changed in 2017 when contracted developers were paid only $3,3 million - more than 4 times less - which means that there're a lot more full-time ones now.

The biggest amount of money was spent in 2017, and there are not really much stats regarding 2018. However, the developers do mention that December 2018 was the most successful month in the history of Star Citizen. Let's hope that this leads to the full release in the foreseeable future. At the worst, our grandchildren will have the chance to finally play the game.