LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN

Citizens,

Thank you for supporting. Thank you for playing. Thank you for your feedback.

It has been great to see more of you playing Star Citizen than ever before, with 35,890 concurrent players at our peak this year. And that growth goes well beyond a single peak. In the first half of 2026, we saw a 7% increase in average daily players and an 11% increase in monthly active players compared to last year. Seeing more of you playing and spending more time in the ‘verse has been incredibly rewarding for all of us at CIG.

Star Citizen Alpha 4.10 is an important step on the road to Star Citizen 1.0 because it brings area and encounter instancing to the Persistent Universe with Siege of Orison.

We already have a basic version of instancing in the game, via player hangars, but this next iteration of instancing brings the ability to stream arbitrary areas and all the related content in on demand, a seamless connection to the main shared universe, along with dynamic server loading. Instancing in 4.10 is the first use case of dynamic server meshing in Star Citizen.

Up until now each universe shard has a set number of servers, each allocated to different areas (called territories internally). So microTech (and everything on microTech) is a territory and has a server looking over it. But if too many people flock to microTech / New Babbage the static system doesn’t have the ability to spin up additional servers to split the simulation load and the singular server in charge of the microTech territory starts to run slower and slower, which results in degraded player experience. With dynamic server meshing we will spin up additional servers as the simulation load demands, subdividing the territories into smaller ones.

When instances are created, we monitor server load and when we hit a specified maximum load ratio we will spin up additional servers to manage the additional instances dynamically. The Networking team calls this Quasi Dynamic Server Meshing (QDSM) because we are not yet subdividing territories in the persistent universe but it is the first case of us spinning up (and down) servers dynamically based on load and required us to create a lot of the services that you need for full dynamic meshing in the persistent universe.

While a lot of other MMOs have instancing, they don’t have the specific kind of instancing we do, that needs to seamlessly interact with a fully dynamic meshed shared persistent universe, which upped the complexity level of the technology significantly.

I am happy to report that with your help testing Siege of Orison, the Instancing is finally performing well. It took us longer to get there than we thought, but like a lot of things in Star Citizen it turned out to have more complexities and edge cases than we expected.

As part of today's launch, we’re sharing a video about the process of delivering 4.10, which I would recommend that you watch. Star Citizen has been made possible by all your support over the years and one of key aspects that encouraged that support was how open we have been with development, sharing our failures and successes along the way. Over this year and last, I've felt that we’ve been sharing the process of building Star Citizen less and less. Many of you backed for how open we were in development, and it’s much easier to understand why things aren’t always perfect when we share the process and you can see the difficulties of achieving what is the most ambitious game in all of gaming. This video is the first step at getting back to going behind the scenes. Everyone at CIG is passionate about Star Citizen and doing nothing but the best work. Sharing more of our development is a great way to show that, so we're getting back to our roots.

I also want to take the opportunity to clear up some misconceptions that I see in community discussion.

The biggest one I see floated is Star Citizen’s technical issues are due to its engine choice;

Star Engine is our engine, which originally started as a branch from CryEngine 3. Since Oct of 2015 we stopped taking updates and have just been refactoring and adding to the code base to the extent that there is almost nothing left of the original engine – the Entity System, Renderer (which has hardware assisted Ray Tracing / Global Illumination now for Squadron 42), GPU Particle System, DNA and Facial animation system, Audio system, UI system, Network / Replication Systems, Physics and all our Gameplay Systems are entirely new and bespoke to Star Citizen and Squadron 42. In addition to that a Game Engine is only a small part of the code and systems you need to run a massively multiplayer game like Star Citizen. We have dozens of distributed online services that run in the cloud, connected to multiple backend databases that all have to be managed as one big synchronistic system.

The switch from CryEngine to Lumberyard was for Amazon Web Services (AWS) which is where we ran our servers and platform for many years. Lumberyard started as a full branch of the same CryEngine branch we were based off, so we could switch to it with no changes on the core engine side as Amazon had bought out the rights to that version of CryEngine. Amazon heavily modified CryEngine over the years which is what people know as the Lumberyard engine, and there was good work in there, but we never took any of this as our tech road map has always specifically been for the needs of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.

In 2020 we came to agreement with Crytek that gave us a perpetual license for the branch of CryEngine we were on for all our current and future games, giving us full control over the use of Star Engine going forward, which you can appreciate is important due to the investments we have made into our technology.

There is NO Game Engine than can do everything we can do in Star Citizen. There is also NO game that can do everything we can do, at the scale and fidelity that we do it.

That is because it is a crazily complex and demanding set of requirements to operate with the detail we do in a seamless first-person viewpoint in a universe that you can go to any corner of and explore. Every planet or moon is fully realized and circumnavigable on foot, by vehicle or by ship. Every vehicle operates like a real one, a complex set of different components that enable your ship to fly and sustain you, components you can physically interact with; that can break or be damaged, that you can repair or replace. You can fluidly go from foot into a ground vehicle into a spaceship, take off, fly to a moon or spaceship you can see from the ground, all while being able to fully move around that ship, which in some cases is the size of whole game levels in most FPS games, land, get out and explore that planet. All seamlessly, with no loading screens or delays.

Building a tech stack that can deliver all this is a crazy investment in both time and money. To put the resources in perspective, our Core Tech Group is 146 strong with 106 engineers in it! This is our engine, tools and backend team dedicated to building the technology we use. We are very lucky to be afforded the time and money to invest into creating technology that enables Star Engine. Most developers don’t have the resources to do this, which is why you see people licensing Unreal or Unity, as well as building games with smaller scopes. There was a lot of headlines about Star Citizen passing the one billion dollars raised threshold earlier this year, but the reality is building something like we are requires funding at this level. Rockstar (who are the main developer for GTA6) has spent over two billion dollars in staff and office costs in the UK from 2019 until the end of 2025. I know this because like CIG UK Ltd, Rockstar Games Ltd has to publish financials on Companies House, and so their costs are public. This is not to criticise them at all – I love their games, and their ambition and commitment to gameplay married to fidelity and scale is awe inducing. I am pointing this out as it takes this kind of funding to build games and technology that do things you haven’t seen before.

The second misconception I see thrown around is that Star Citizen has a skeleton crew and all the resources and money is being spent on the Squadron 42. I want to clarify here. Outside of CTG we have a further 611 staff in development across our four studios. For the last couple of years, we’ve been split approximately 50/50 between Star Citizen and Squadron 42. Before that it was more heavily weighted to Star Citizen. One of the reasons that Squadron 42 has been taking the time it has is that we were always reassigning resources onto Star Citizen to get the patches out, which pushed back Squadron. In fact, after our 2023 CitizenCon in LA where we showed off a lot of the functionality we were working on for Squadron, the majority of the gameplay engineering team spent a large part of 2024 bringing a lot of the features into Star Citizen at the expense of Squadron. Towards the end of 2024 we decided that couldn’t continue so we shifted the balance back. In these final months on Squadron 42 that split is now 55% to 45% in Squadron’s favour, to ensure we get Squadron 42 bug free, polished and optimized. Because the sooner we finish Squadron 42, the sooner the majority of the development staff can focus on bringing Star Citizen to 1.0. Having to split time and resources between two hugely ambitious projects is very difficult.

Which brings me to the last thing I wanted to touch on. Squadron 42's release.

At CitizenCon 2024 we announced we would ship in 2026. Our plan was to release in Q4 around IAE. But much like the rest of the industry there is no way I want to launch my spiritual successor to Wing Commander, a game that has had twelve years of blood, sweat and tears invested into it (we started Squadron 42 development in 2014 as 2013 was opening studios, hiring people and getting the Hangar module out for Star Citizen) launching into the attention buzz saw of GTA6. While GTA6 isn’t launching on PC this November, pretty much all outlets and most content creators will be all over it, not leaving a lot of room for other coverage.

We have taken a look at the release windows at the start of 2027, and decided that Q2 provides a better time for Squadron 42 to release.

We are allowing a small number of original backers and long-time Star Citizen content creators an opportunity to play Squadron 42 this October 9th and 10th. We’ll be making further announcements about our release plans during this time and a specific release date shortly afterwards.

I know a lot of you will be disappointed to not be playing Squadron 42 at the end of this year, but it is the best thing for the project as it is truly something special and so needs to the opportunity to have the focus of the wider gaming world.

I want to wrap this up by thanking all of you for your support. Ive seen a few people question why there wasn’t a Letter for the Chairman at the $1 billion crowdfunded milestone, and honestly, I felt it shouldn’t be about the money as Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are much more than a financial headline. You can see from the voluntary financials we publish we invest all the money we raise back into the development of these two games.

But in reflection I was looking at this wrong. The billion dollars is a testament and celebration of all of you; the backers and community members that have given me and CIG your faith and patience. That have stood by through thick and thin. All of you that have held the line. It is a testimony to the power of a collective to make something unprecedented happen. There is no publisher or Private Equity investor that would have the patience and willingness to invest in the long term like you have. You have raised a billion dollars to make something that could not exist otherwise.

And for that I am incredibly lucky and humbled by. There are some amazing things ahead, but even right now I feel that Star Citizen is special. And that is because of all of you!

I hope you enjoy SC Alpha 4.10, and I will see you in the ‘verse!

Quelle: