Cloud Imperium Games founder and Star Citizen boss Chris Roberts has posted one of his extensive “letters from the Chairman” providing insight on the development of the crowdfunded game.
Roberts started by talking about the achievements reached in 2020 and the growth of the Star Citizen community.
“I can’t think of a better quote that encapsulates what Star Citizen has achieved this year, and the horrible year that 2020 became, as the world became upended by the biggest global pandemic since the 1918 influenza pandemic.
I would have never guessed last year that I would spend the last nine months of 2020 working from home under various levels of lockdowns, that I wouldn’t be able to travel to see friends or family in person or visit our various offices. COVID-19 has affected billions of people and cut short the life of way too many. To any of you that have lost friends or family members, or been adversely affected economically, our thoughts are with you. Hopefully 2021 will be a better year, allowing all of us to get back to a semblance of normal life. We certainly miss the personal connection we have internally when working together in the same space, or we get to experience with the community at events like CitizenCon, various Bar Citizens or get-togethers.
The growth of Star Citizen’s community and the increased amount of time spent playing is one of the few bright spots of 2020 for me. One of the strengths of Star Citizen is that it is a place where people can meet up and adventure together, away from the worries of the world, with friends or strangers. People may not have been able to socialize in person but through our revamped friends system, FOIP/VOIP, chat or third party apps like Discord, people have been able to get together and have fun in Star Citizen’s virtual universe. With the reduction of human connection in the real world, multiplayer games like Star Citizen have been essential in maintaining some semblance of human connection in an isolating time.
This has been borne out by the number of hours and active users that have played Star Citizen this year. When I look back on the breadth and passion of our player-base this year, I’m amazed. In 2020, we had players from over 200 unique countries and territories around the world and from 56,340 unique cities play 26,576,364 hours of Star Citizen. This year, we had over 740,000 unique players play Star Citizen, and we still have another week and a half to go. Nearly half a million of them were returning or continually active players, and a quarter of a million were complete newcomers to the ‘verse that we welcomed to our community this year. It’s no wonder that with that type of record engagement we had our most successful year of revenue ever, eclipsing last year’s historic mark by over 60% (you can read about our 2019 Financials in our annual post by our CFO).”
Speaking of the community, we also get plenty of data about engagement, which has grown considerably.
“Several years ago, in keeping with our value of transparent development, we began sharing our financials with you at the end of each year. This year, we decided to take that one step further and talk about engagement and player growth in 2020.
If you’ve been following Star Citizen for years, you’ll notice that 2020 was an unprecedented year with explosive growth. The only publicly available metric we provided until recently is spending on our game, via the “funding tracker.” That title is a bit of a misnomer, as we now have thousands of players that are coming to the project as new players without knowledge of its crowdfunding history and are instead spending for early access to the Star Citizen alpha and the current experience it provides.
The spending on Star Citizen has indeed been phenomenal, and our revenues as shown on the tracker have set monthly records since January, with the exception of October and December, which has yet to close. 2019 was itself a record year at the time, with $48 million in sales revenue, yet 2020 is so far already 60% higher, and will likely close at over $80 million in sales this year.
Some might think that this is all old backers spending more, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Fueling this explosive growth is new players discovering Star Citizen for the first time. Revenues are a lagging indicator, and by themselves tell a very small part of the story. Only if you are doing everything else right will players come and will spending rise. The single biggest takeaway for 2020 is that as we shifted towards a “Playable Now” narrative and delivered more features and content, alongside a greater emphasis on quality of life and performance, we found ourselves drawing more and more new gamers into our universe and reactivating more old backers to return to check out our progress. And despite the fact that we continue to be alpha software with bugs and developing features, these players – new and reactivated – are sticking around in greater numbers than ever before.
Bringing New Players Into the ‘Verse
We added over four hundred thousand new accounts to the game in 2020, and grew our paying players by 20%, recording our best year ever in terms of new paid player growth (and our second best in new accounts). This January, we crossed 1 million paying player accounts, and have been steadily adding tens of thousands more every month, especially in May when we debuted Invictus Launch Week. Today, we stand at 1,177,919 Paying Accounts and counting. Even before COVID-19 hit the world, we were recording our best months ever in Q1 in New Accounts, New Paying Players, and revenues. And as the year progressed, we found ourselves building towards our best year ever in new player growth, reactivated players, and unique active players.First Human-Tevarin War metamorphosis nature
Rising Engagement
Beyond recording our best new player growth numbers ever, in terms of daily engagement we’ve continued to average 30k Daily Active Users throughout the year, which is a 70% increase over last year. And our MAU (monthly active users) is roughly 35-40% higher than 2019 and 2018. For the whole year (keeping in mind that we still have 10 of our busiest days of the year to go), 2020 has proven to be our biggest year ever in terms of total unique logins. We had over 33 million game sessions started by over 740,000 Unique Players so far in 2020. That Unique Player count is 35% and 40% higher than 2019 and 2018, respectively, and 25% higher than our previous high in 2016 (fresh off the novelty and excitement of the Persistent Universe finally going live).Pulsar
Carbon compounds Diffusion
Quadrupling Play Time
We know that this may be hard to believe for some long-time backers who have followed the project for years and been playing since the days of driving a Greycat PTV through your hangar. Moreover, recency bias often leads us to believe that the last 30k or other game-stopping bug means the game is buggier than ever. But in fact, the complete opposite is true. Yes, the game is still in alpha with bugs, and yes, our stability and performance is not yet at gold master software standards; we recognize that and are focused on improving performance with each patch. We know it may not feel like it at times, but Star Citizen is actually more performant than ever before, and the player stats are what tell us that. Since we delivered 2.0 at the end of 2015, our minutes played per player have been steadily increasing. And concurrency, which before was drastically constrained by crashes and bugs that induced restarts, has been steadily climbing as our game environment has become more stable, allowing more players to stay online for longer periods of time. In the first 12 months after we rolled out the Persistent Universe with 2.0, our players were averaging about 32 minutes of play time per day. Today, minutes played per player per day has more than quadrupled.Nut job
In 2016, fresh off the launch of 2.0, players were averaging 32 minutes of playtime per day. That number jumped to 56 minutes on average per day for 2017. In 2018, it jumped again to 81 minutes per day. In 2019, that average increased to 114 minutes played per day per player. And now in 2020, we find ourselves at an average playtime per player per day of 2 hours and 25 minutes.”
Below you can find a few graphs visualizing the progression mentioned above.