At the end of 2022, Chris Roberts published financial data from 2021 and player data from 2022 – both showing enormous growth. He also outlines a roadmap for 2023.
(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”ve summarised the most exciting info.
One Million Players
Despite the long development phase and a still distant release, Star Citizen is growing rapidly. As Chris Roberts reports, in 2022 over one million players logged in and played a total of over 46 million hours. Compared to 2021, that”s a 50 percent growth and a doubling of the player numbers from 2019.
Of that million players, by the way, about 240,000 play on a monthly basis. Here, too, there are about a third more players than in 2021. The strongest month, by the way, was in May with 400,000 monthly active users, when update 3.17 was launched In total, a full 800,000 new accounts were created in 2022.
Over 100 million in revenue Not only did player numbers climb to record levels, so did annual revenue. As the financial report for 2021 has now shown, Cloud Imperium was able to increase its revenues by another 14 percent compared to the previous year and thus crack the 100 million mark. As a reason for this growth, the report cites above all the newly added players who spent money on Starter Packs. These grant access to the Star Citizen Alpha. Purchases of in-game ships and other items also increased. Returning players were not entirely uninvolved here either.
Over 100 million in revenue
Not only the number of players, but also the annual revenue climbed to a record level. As the (Financial Report for 2021) now showed, Cloud Imperium was able to increase revenues by another 14 percent compared to the previous year, cracking the 100-million mark.
The report cites the newly added 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. Returning players were not entirely uninvolved here either.
What is planned for 2023
In addition to the record-breaking news, Roberts also gave a sneak peek at 2023, with patch 3.18 set to be rolled out to the LIVE environment in the new year, bringing with it the Persistent Entity Streaming feature (PES for short). With the system, all player-based interventions in the world, such as shot down bodies, wrecks or left items, should remain in the game world instead of disappearing at some point.
Currently, the patch is in its first wave on the test servers and is being put through its paces. Once the PES system is working and mature enough, the plan is to move on to separating the game server and replication layer:
“The next step will be to separate the replication layer (RL), the in-memory cache that stores all dynamic object state, from the game server and have scalable RL workers that communicate state changes between the various game clients, servers and the RL. […] Once this is done, we will be able to have multiple game servers communicate with the RL (similar to how multiple game clients communicate with the RL now), which will allow Star Citizen to have multiple servers simulating the state of the universe, which we call Server Meshing (SM)“.
Chris Roberts
The server meshing will then be tackled in several phases and versions. The goal of this development step is to increase the player capacity per server and to connect the Star Citizen universe with further star systems. The Pyro system will be the first of these.
Besides this major project, smaller contents and features are also to be implemented in 2023, 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
- strongly improved interaction system
- FPS scanning
- new star map
- deeper combat AI
According to current plans, all these steps should be completed by the end of the New Year.
