For Sale: one spaceship. It’s an exploration vessel, with an advanced jump drive, reinforced fuel tanks for long-duration flight, and capable of carrying a crew of five. It’s yours for just $350.  If that’s a bit steep, there’s a smaller interceptor-style space fighter craft for $90. If you’re feeling flush, or want to go in with a group of friends to form a crew, you can buy a huge Javelin-class destroyer, bristling with turrets. That’ll set you back $2,500.  If this sounds to you like science fiction, you would be correct. But the money changing hands is real. Two hundred people have already paid $2,500 for a Javelin-class starship of their very own.  These spacecraft are being pre-purchased for use in an eagerly awaited multiplayer online PC game called Star Citizen, currently in development by Cloud Imperium Games. In their eagerness to play, people have been buying starships in huge numbers, which has helped the game’s makers completely annihilate all previous crowdfunding records.  To date, the developers have raised just over $65m from nearly 700,000 backers, which makes Star Citizen the largest crowdfunded project there has ever been by a huge margin. (The next largest, a publishing platform called Ethereum, has raised a comparatively paltry $18m.)  The Guinness World Records company officially gave Star Citizen the record for largest crowdfunding project in March, when backing for the project reached $39m – a number Cloud Imperium is now well on its way to doubling.  Early support was so overwhelming that it crashed Cloud Imperium’s site in October 2012. A Kickstarter campaign, launched partly as a stopgap measure while they extended their server capacity, raised more than $2.1m.  David Swofford, the director of communications of Cloud Imperium Games, said that Star Citizen raised more than $6m in November alone. “We’re hitting six or seven-million dollar months as a regular occurrence,” he told the Guardian.  The game is the brainchild of Chris Roberts, the developer behind the 1990s cult classic Wing Commander series and the acclaimed space combat game Starlancer.  After selling his production house, Digital Anvil, to previous backers Microsoft in 2000, Roberts left video games for Hollywood, where he was a producer on such movies as The Punisher, Lucky Number Slevin and Lord of War. Star Citizen marks his return to gaming.  The game itself is a hugely ambitious project. It will have a full supply-and-demand economy in a massively multiplayer online world, as well as spin-off single-player campaigns, and will feature both first-person and space combat viewpoints – meaning you will be able to both pilot your ship and explore inside it.  It will also, according to a release by Cloud Imperium Games, be Oculus Rift compatible.  In a 2012 interview with the Guardian, Roberts said that the game will have a fixed upfront fee for the initial download, but no ongoing subscription fees. He said income will come from purchases of ship and weapons upgrades, which will be done either with in-game earned currency, or real-world currency.  “I want the players to feel like what they do has an impact on the events that unfold,” Roberts said in 2012. “It’s about ownership: I want players to feel like they’re becoming part of the lore, the history of this galaxy.”  Swofford told the Guardian that the early backers were fans of Roberts’s original games like Wing Commander, “a very avid, very passionate community”, but that now word has reached a much, much wider audience.  “I gotta say,” he said. “It is quite amazing.”
An eagerly awaited online PC game designed by acclaimed developer Chris Roberts has raised more than three times the previous record