Star Citizen passes $10m raised mark

Star Citizen, the crowd funded space trading and combat sim from Wing Commander creator Chris Roberts, has passed the $10 million raised mark.

At the time of publication it had raised an incredible $10,662,857, a few hundred thousand dollars more than Pebble, the E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android that raised $10,266,845 on Kickstarter.

Now, Roberts' company and developer of the game Cloud Imperium has claimed Star Citizen as the number one crowd funded project of all time. Roberts raised just over $2 million on Kickstarter and just over $8.5 million on the Robert Space Industries website. It counts 194,050 "space sim fans".

The Star Citizen crowd funding effort has been hugely successful. Back in October the game smashed its Kickstarter goal with 26 days to spare. The decision to launch a Kickstarter page was taken after RobertSpaceIndustries.com collapsed under the weight of fan interest.

Roberts' crowd funding effort is unique in that he had wanted to raise between two and four million dollars to validate his private investors' valuation of the project and thus spark further investment. The game itself will cost between 12 million and 14 million dollars to create.

"I can make it for this price because I'm not making it inside the system," he told Eurogamer. "If I did it inside the system that would be $20+ million."