Overwhelming Response to Star Citizen Reveal Keeps Site Crushed

Since Lawrence first learned about Chris Roberts’ totally sick looking new space sim project, Star Citizen, I’ve been eager to learn more and see what happens next. When he unveiled the project at GDC the other day, he also discussed a crowd-funding component that would help transform the game from possibility into reality. Eschewing Kickstarter in favor of doing things on his own, it seems that the demand for the game was a bit larger than he could’ve predicted: ever since the first initial crush smashed his website, Roberts and his team have been fighting to bring the main pledge page back online.

He sent out an e-mail to his subscribers today, saying:

“The downside of all this attention was that the huge number of people from all around the world trying to learn about Star Citizen and make their pledge, crashed our custom crowd funding page and also took down the core community site.

Until then, we were on track to break crowd funding records. Now, thirty hours later, we’re only just getting the core site back online. The proper crowd funding page is still unfortunately down, but we have a backup site that, while not having the full range of features we intended, can take people’s pledges. With this site we have to update the data manually as there is no way to easily collect the crowd funding statistics on a live basis, which is why you haven’t seen a counter on the backup site.”

Roberts also added that, with only two days’ worth of fundraising, the project has already garnered 4,564 pledges and $455,590 in funding thus far. He sums up the accomplishment pretty well, saying it’s “pretty impressive considering the outage we’ve had.”

It isn’t clear just how much cash they’re looking to raise, but if we do some EXTREMELY basic estimations, multiplying the above two-day total by 15 (to get 30 days at the exact same rate), we get $6,833,850. Obviously the project won’t stay at the very same rate of growth it’s been at, but even downgrading it still puts Roberts’ project within the million or so mark. Not only that, but the game is said to have private investment helping it along the way, so it’ll be interesting to see where all this ends up.

Will this be enough to ensure everything that’s being promised? I’m going to say probably not…it all sounds extremely ambitious, and I’m usually kind of suspicious of folks who promise a lot. But no matter what comes out of this, I’m hella intrigued. Space games!

Star Citizen’s Crowd-funding Site