Letter From the Chairman 12/30/2022 - 12:57 AM
Hello everyone, As we close out 2022 and head into 2023, I wanted to take the time to thank everyone for being such an amazing, enthusiastic, and supportive community. The not-so-secret sauce of Cloud Imperium’s ability to have the time and resources to build a universe of the detail, scale and scope of Star Citizen is the community’s full-throated embrace of the ultimate goal of a fully connected and simulated science fiction universe that allows players to engage in first-person gameplay and adventures almost without boundaries. There is no other way Star Citizen could be built except for the community-driven funding model. The investment both in time and money is just too expensive for a normal game publisher, especially a public one beholden to quarterly earnings reports and shareholders. A great example of our ability to take the long-term view and invest in research and development that most projects don’t have the time or ambition for is Persistent Entity Streaming (PES), which creates true lasting persistence for the Star Citizen universe; if you leave some equipment in a remote cave, shoot down a bounty over Daymar, manage to fend off some pirates around Yela – the results of your actions will persist – items, debris, ships, even dead bodies will all stay where they were left and still be there even if you log off and return a week later - assuming other players haven’t taken or cleaned up the results of your adventures!
To do this for a universe as big and detailed as Star Citizen, to have this apply to everything, not just player-owned items, for a MMO with millions of players is a major technical accomplishment – I am not aware of any other large-scale MMO that has tried to deliver this level of persistence. PES is the headline feature of Star Citizen Alpha 3.18, and while we didn’t manage to release to LIVE before the end of 2022, it is currently in wave 1 of PTU (Public Test Universe – the testbed wherein we harden patches with the community’s help before we deem the patch stable enough for LIVE release) and there are already lots of community videos and posts about the emergent gameplay that is enabled by PES, especially when combined with some other 3.18 features such as Salvage and “soft” death (where the ship doesn’t blow up into pieces, but instead becomes disabled, allowing players to survive a once-fatal event and attackers to board and potentially loot the disabled ship). PES is an example of how all your support has enabled Star Citizen to expand its boundaries and possibilities. But the community’s contribution goes much further than funding Star Citizen’s development, as contributing ideas, giving feedback, and testing the various updates we release are all part of the symbiotic relationship between Cloud Imperium and the Star Citizen community. There are plenty of features and content that I, and the development team, dream up, but there are equally many things that come from you, the community. The development of Star Citizen is a fusion of the development team and the community playing it; ideas are passed back and forth, made better, released, tested, and iterated on. Some of the recent racetracks that debuted in 3.17.2 and now in 3.18 are the result of the community finding interesting areas to race around, which in turn inspired developers to flesh them out and start to add time trial functionality to the ship HUDs. This is just one example; there are too many others to list in detail as this same dynamic happens with everything in Star Citizen. Your actions in the ‘verse inspire the Star Citizen team to improve and push the boundaries even further. And what is even more exciting is that this community grows larger every year. More and more people discover Star Citizen through their friends, online videos or people streaming their gameplay, are then intrigued and jump into the ‘verse.
In my Letter from the Chairman in May of this year, I mentioned just how strongly we started 2022 in terms of new players joining the ‘verse. This trend has continued through the rest of the year fueled by Invictus Launch Week and then continued with the release of Alpha 3.17.2, which really should have been numbered as a full patch due to the number of features, content and optimizations that we put in it, knowing that Alpha 3.18 was going to take extra time due to the complexity of PES. The biggest headline of 3.17.2 was the increase in server capacity from 50 players to over 100 players, which was enabled by the ongoing multi-threading and optimization work the engine and gameplay teams had been working on in the background. This enabled a more active and busier PU for players and allowed for some truly spectacular player-driven events like 100+ person fleet battles or ship meets. In November we released Alpha 3.17.4 just in time for the 2952 edition of IAE, which debuted two new flyable ships in the Drake Cutter and Corsair, as well as the RSI Galaxy, a large modular multi-role ship that has been added to the ship production pipeline, and a playable nifty off-road vehicle, the Greycat Sports Terrain Vehicle (STV). We also added servers in Hong Kong for our exploding player base in Asia Pacific. All of this combined with the return of Jumptown and our other Dynamic Events like XenoThreat and Nine Tails Lockdown kept the ‘verse more engaged and active than any year previously!
Another Record-Breaking Year of Growth While our most passionate players test 3.18 in PTU, and our developers take a well-deserved break, I wanted to share with you some truly momentous stats from this year that illustrate that Star Citizen had its best year yet and crossed some historic milestones that demonstrate this game we all love is finally breaking into the larger gaming consciousness with a success that is greater and faster than we anticipated. This year, over 1 million unique players logged into Star Citizen and played our game. And they did so for more than 46 million hours. Our Daily Active Users (DAU) this year, i.e. unique players logging in each day, has grown 50% over last year, and is double what it was at the end of 2019. This year, we are also averaging over 240,000 Monthly Active Users, which is 33% higher than our average MAU from last year, with highs of over 400,000 during May with this year’s Invictus Launch Week.
Those of you who follow our Funding Tracker doubtless know that we had already eclipsed all last year’s revenues by mid-November, and will have our first $100 million+ year ever (and by a fair margin). You can also read a more in-depth report of our 2021 financials here. But as great as 2021 was – which was remarkable for growing beyond the COVID-bolstered revenues of 2020 – we managed to grow 30% beyond 2021! Where does all that revenue go? Right back into development, as we’ve hired more than ever before and continued to build out our Squadron 42 and Persistent Universe teams. It’s no secret that our two games and our technology are among the most complex and complicated endeavors in the gaming and even tech industry; we’re doing things with our engine that are truly groundbreaking. And it takes talent and time to achieve the ambitious goals we’ve set for ourselves. And so even as we grow, we invest all that growth back into our teams through hiring and retaining our critical talent. A huge portion of our growing revenue has come exclusively from New Players that only joined Star Citizen this year. In fact, this year, we witnessed truly explosive growth. Over 800,000 New Accounts were created this year to follow or play our project. Our New Players this year have almost doubled this year, compared to last year, with over half a million new players joining us during Free Flies, Dynamic Events, and throughout 2022. And of those new players this year, over 70% of them stayed around as paying players who purchased starter packs to get access to the Star Citizen Alpha to keep their adventures going in the ‘verse.
Bar Citizen World Tour & CitizenCon
Throughout 2022, members of our team had the opportunity to attend various Bar Citizen events around the globe. We are grateful for the chance to connect with all of you at these events, especially those who are farther from our offices. The past few years during the pandemic have reminded us of the importance and significance of in-person events, and there is nothing quite like the energy and excitement of Bar Citizen. Seeing and experiencing your passion and support in-person energizes us for the work ahead. We have always been inspired by the creativity and camaraderie at these events, and we believe they will continue to be a highlight of our community for years to come.
For these reasons, and many more, I’m happy to share that we plan to continue this initiative in 2023. Our Community Team is always interested in learning about upcoming events in your area, so be sure to share your events on Spectrum.
And in case you missed it, Sandi Roberts also recently announced that in-person CitizenCon will be returning in 2023, in Los Angeles. We are looking forward to seeing you all there for a day of celebrating the Star Citizen Universe with fellow community members. We’ll share more information as soon as we have it, so stay tuned for more details on the event.
New Places to Call Home In my last letter, we shared some early imagery of our new Manchester and Frankfurt offices that were previously under construction. I am happy to report we have now moved into both offices, Frankfurt at the end of August and Manchester in mid-October. Having our staff together in the office makes a huge difference to our teamwork. We’ve struggled at times to hit our goals for 2022, and while we will always achieve incredible things at Cloud Imperium Games, I have personally seen a significant change in pace towards the end of the year resulting from most of us being in the office, which we were finally able to achieve once our two new offices in Frankfurt and Manchester were ready to be occupied. The huge new offices in downtown Manchester were especially important as we had grown way beyond the capacity of the old Wilmslow office during the pandemic and so could not properly return to office until we had the extra space. Now that our teams have moved back in, we’re especially eager to give you all a tour of our new facilities. We plan to do just that in the coming months as we wrap up final touches on the facilities. You can expect a video tour, alongside the return of periodic studio tours for those looking to visit us in-person (of course, with limited capacity when available). We’re also planning on opening our doors for a couple of fun in-house events for our Concierge and Subscribers – stay tuned for more information on that in the new year.
Star Citizen Alpha 3.18 Last week we opened the gates and welcomed Wave 1 testers to check out the latest content and technologies in Star Citizen Alpha 3.18. This upcoming patch release marks a giant technical leap forward on Star Citizen's journey to deliver the uncompromising and near-limitless universe that we’ve all been dreaming of. Far from our typical quarterly patch, this release introduces fundamental changes to our entire backend, bringing an all-new set of backend services, granting universal persistence, and even the mass migration of the entire game-state into the cloud, which is a tremendous undertaking and accomplishment for our teams.
Since hitting Wave 1, tens of thousands of you have dived in to experience the long-awaited salvage profession, an entirely new economic and non-combat career path for pilots in the ‘verse. The ability to salvage will allow pilots to retrieve valuable materials from target ships and sell them for profit. The new salvage profession is supported through the addition of new technology and tools including a complete cargo refactor, giving cargo a physical representation in-game. Alpha 3.18 also includes the launch of the Drake Interplanetary Vulture, a new entry-level flyable salvage ship in the Drake lineup of vessels, perfect for pilots beginning their career in salvage, alongside updated functionality so Reclaimer pilots can finally utilize their behemoth of a ship. While salvage, new racetracks, new POIs, and some of the other visual stimulating mechanics will take the spotlight, the largest change to our universe comes from powerful work under the hood, with Persistent Entity Streaming (PES). With this new tech, all physical objects moved or placed by players will be dynamically tracked on the server they were moved on and remain in their new locations. PES represents the largest technical update in the game’s history and is a critical addition in laying the foundation for future technology and full in-game persistence that will unlock a new level of immersion in the ‘verse
As we move towards making 3.18 stable enough to release to the Live service I’d like to give a special shoutout to everyone who has been testing 3.18 so far on the Public Test Servers – especially those from our dedicated Evocati group, who put many hard hours in when the patch was in its roughest and most frustrating state. Thanks to your efforts, we’ve been able to iterate in real-time and implement improvements and fixes quicker than ever.
Looking Forward – The Road to Alpha 4.0 This coming year is going to be a huge one for Star Citizen, possibly its biggest one to date! The first order of business is to continue to stabilize Alpha 3.18 so we can release to the Live servers in January, once the team is back from their well-earned Holiday break. Then we will continue to “harden” PES, improving aspects and adding some additional quality of life features like the ability to specify which PES Shard you would like to join. The current game server / PES shard matchmaking tries to match you to the last PES shard you were in when you log back in or recover from a crash, but if that shard is full, it places you in a different one. But in the short term, before Server Meshing makes this not so necessary, we also want to give players the choice to wait in a queue for their preferred shard if it is full. The next step will be to separate the Replication Layer (RL), the in-memory cache that remembers all dynamic object's state, from the Game Server and have scalable RL workers that communicate the state changes between the various game clients, servers, and the RL. This is very important for Server Meshing, as universe state needs to be fully decoupled from server state. It will also make Star Citizen much more crash resilient on the client side as a server crash will no longer take down the RL as well, meaning that clients can stay connected while a new server takes over where the last one left off. It will also have the added benefit of having the view every client has of the universe around it be a little more fluid with less lag as the client’s update and refresh of object state will no longer be tied to the tick rate of the game server. This means players will see state changes from other remote clients and game servers as they happen at the rates the various clients and servers push them. Once this happens, we’ll be able to have multiple game servers communicate with the RL (much like multiple game clients communicate right now with the RL) allowing Star Citizen to have multiple servers simulating the universe’s state, which we call Server Meshing (SM). We will start with Static Server Meshing, where different servers are assigned to simulate different Entity Zones in a star system. Entity Zones, sometimes referred to as Local Grids, are separate simulation areas; the inside of a spaceship is a different Zone to the space around which the spaceship flies. A planet is a different Zone than the Star System Zone where all the planets and moons exist in, and a landing zone can also be a different Zone, nested inside the Planet Zone, nested in the Star System Zone. At first, the servers will be bound to fixed Zones but we will quickly move to Dynamic Server Meshing V1, where we assign servers dynamically to Entity Zones, based on gameplay and simulation load. This will be a much more efficient use of the servers in the cloud, as you only need servers where the players are, whereas with Static SM you have servers assigned to Zones, even if there are no players there. Dynamic Server Meshing V2 will take this dynamic assignment of servers one step further by subdividing Entity Zones into “simulation islands” (this is organizing the dynamic objects in one Zone / Local Grid into different groups, based on which objects can interact / collide with each other), allowing these islands to be distributed between servers to again help balance simulation load. At this point we should be able to handle tens of thousands of players all playing in the same PES universe shard, bringing Star Citizen much closer to the ultimate goal of a huge living universe densely populated with players and AI. Once we achieve Static Server Meshing, we can open the universe of Star Citizen to other star systems, starting with Pyro. By having authority pass from one server to another, you’ll be able to transition seamlessly (without the need to log out of game) between star systems.
We are aiming to put Static Server Meshing and Pyro into the hands of players in the fourth quarter of 2023. The large caveat with this goal is that complicated engineering work that involves a completely new paradigm, requires a host of new backend services, and technology is hard to estimate and schedule accurately as the issues and problems that can come up along the way are hard to foresee as no one has implemented this system before, and plans rarely survive contact with the users, especially at scale. This has been true for PES, as it is no secret that we were hoping to have Alpha 3.18 and PES release to Live by end of the year as opposed to just the PTU. Delays in finalizing 3.18 and PES impact the team’s ability to start on the next stage, and we still have the unknowns of how PES performs after months of heavy load, and people seeing exactly how much space junk they can leave around! Beyond this, there are a host of other exciting features and content we have planned for 2023; Pyro with its assorted planets, moons, settlements, space stations and assorted factions and AI population being the headline, but we also will be rolling out the New Item Resource system in ships which replaces the old pipe system with a much more dynamic and scalable system to allow for truly emergent behavior (in fact elements of this new system can already be seen in 3.18 in the Salvage gameplay), Bounty Hunting with a full tracking system and the ability to actively restrain and transport both players and AI, Persistent Hangars with freight elevators allowing you to call up your stored inventory or place things into storage. Towards the end of the year, we should see some of the more Squadron 42 related work arrive in Star Citizen; more flexible player traversal, especially on ladders and ledges, a greatly improved interaction system, FPS scanning, the new Star Map, MFDs using the more performant and flexible building blocks UI system and much deeper combat AI. Now that the Gen 12 renderer is functioning in 3.18, the Graphics team will work on multi-threading improvements and optimizations for the renderer as well as hook up the Vulkan Graphics API to it, to unlock some of the performance gains that the Gen 12 renderer can provide. There are numerous more things the Star Citizen team are working on for this coming year, but this letter is already long enough!
Final Thoughts Looking back on 2022, it has been gratifying to see Cloud Imperium and the Star Citizen community grow. We ended the year with 861 employees, and the Community grew to more than 4 million accounts and 1.8M “backers” (accounts that have purchased Star Citizen). We’ve achieved a lot this year, including our moves into two wonderful new homes for most of our staff. We fell short on a few others, like having 3.18 and PES fully live before the end of the year, but this is the nature of game development that tries to boldly go where no game has gone before! What has especially been great is just how much more time people are spending playing Star Citizen this year. This had a lot to do with the increased player count and improved stability, but also Star Citizen, even in its Alpha state is already feature and content rich with a huge number of things to do, with your friends or solo, and this list grows larger with every patch.
The universe and how you interact with it is up to you; from exploring, to hauling, trading, mining, salvage, refueling, refining, bounty hunting, piracy, to being a hired gun to just sightseeing and being a social butterfly. And that is just what we have now – in the future you’ll be able to farm or gather other resources, build, craft and sell. The universe of Star Citizen is a huge sandbox for everyone to play in and I couldn’t be more excited by what the future holds. Star Citizen is more than just a game, it is an escape to another reality where anyone can pursue their imagination, not bound to a single playstyle or profession, where they can interact with other players that share in the same common dream. I feel incredibly lucky and privileged to have the opportunity to pursue this dream with the amazingly talented team at Cloud Imperium and the support and patience of the best community in gaming, the Star Citizen community! From all of us at Cloud Imperium, we wish you all a happy New Year and can’t wait to continue the journey with you in 2023.