Remember Star Citizen? That’s the crowdfunded space exploration video game that has been in alpha for longer than when Cyberpunk 2077 started development, was officially announced to the public, released broken to widespread controversy, and was slowly fixed and redeemed itself.
If I had simply written that the game launched in 2012, you may not really visualize in your mind what that amount of time could have been like. So yes, Mike Pondsmith started consulting with CD Projekt RED to adapt his novel Cyberpunk into a video game the same year Star Citizen was launched as a Kickstarter, raising an initial amount of $ 2.1 million. Cyberpunk 2077 has experienced an entire life cycle of a video game, in fact the entire narrative arc of a broken game redeeming itself, and Star Citizen is still going through cycles of development in alpha, with occasional issues and service outages.
This week, Cloud Imperium Games went through another major snafu in development, but it sure feels a lot different over a decade later.
Star Citizen updated to alpha build 3.18, which Cloud Imperium Games promised to be the biggest update yet. However, the game immediately started experiencing major service issues. As reported by Video Games Chronicle, Star Citizen backers were unable to log on. The number of backers who could not log back in increased to the point that it shifter from a partial outage to major outage, and actually led to the whole game going offline a few hours ago.
As of March 14, 2023, 3:50 UTC, CIG reports on their official website that Star Citizen is currently on a partial outage state. The shared this message:
“Since the launch of Star Citizen Alpha 3.18.0 our teams have been monitoring a number of issues players have been encountering while attempting to log into the game. These have primarily manifested in the form of 19003 and 19004 with a mix of other similar codes.
While monitoring those issues, the team has been able to tune and make adjustments to the entitlement processing flow to ensure that a large portion of player attempts were still successful and able to make it into the PU.
However, at a point in the early morning UTC, the environment entered into a state which would require a more disruptive recovery process.
As of 1300 UTC on 2023-03-12 the environment has been in the process of recovering from the slow / non-responsive state it was in but we wanted to advise that, while this recovery effort is in-progress, players will experience periods of extreme difficulty getting into the PU. We expect players to see a mix of errors from the 19k, 30k, and 60k ranges.”
They also provided this latest update:
“0350 UTC – Reducing severity to partial outage while we validate the outcome of infrastructure maintenance.”
They had a more personal message on the Star Citizen Twitter account, when they tweeted:
“We’re sorry for the super rough start – our team is all hands on deck working to get things running smoothly as quickly as possible. We’ll keep you updated!”
Of course, at this point the wider public had lost interest in Star Citizen. Most of the interest in the game came from those backers, who still can’t buy the game because of its alpha state. They continued Star Citizen’s crowdfunding by buying packages that gave them ships they could play in the alpha.
To put it simply, it’s not a good place for Cloud Imperium Games and Chris Roberts to be in. They still seem capable of continuing development indefinitely, as if Star Citizen is already a finished live service game, instead of an alpha of a work in progress. But the ongoing support for that development is contingent now on the studio’s relationship with those same backers, and it’s definitely possible, even common, for communities to fall out of favor with their favorite games, studios, or developers.
