Star Citizen crowdfunding reaches $14 million

Chris Roberts's crowdfunding campaign for the in-development flight sim game Star Citizen continues to shatter records. Through a blend of Kickstarter but, most significantly, direct contributions had through the project's website, Star Citizen flew past $6.2 million eight months ago and now stands at a staggering $14 million. "Everybody talks about our Kickstarter, but that was just one small part of what we did," Roberts told Gamasutra back in May. "I looked at everything going on on Kickstarter, a lot of it was really good -- but once you did the initial campaign, it was done and over, and I was fairly disappointed with what happened after that." Star Citizen arguably owes a great deal of its continuing contributions from backers thanks to a thriving website community. Funding drives offering exclusive ships and other reward packages enable the development team to set and meet successive goalposts more difficult to obtain through a limited crowdfunding window like Kickstarter. "I felt like no matter what, you've got to have a place where all the people that backed you are going to hang out, listen to what's happening with the game, and interact, so why wait to do that later on?" Roberts told us in May.