2016 was certainly a dark year, but the dawn of 2017 is bringing hope to many. One developer that definitely has a lot of hope for the future is Cloud Imperium gaming, whose flagship title Star Citizen has plenty to celebrate. Back in 2012, the developer launched the crowdfunding campaign for its flagship game, Star Citizen. The developers planned to make the game as a sandbox-style space sim built in Cryengine 3. It is probably safe to say that the campaign is a success, given the news now that Star Citizen earns more than $140 million in backing.

A new email from Cloud Imperium Games founder Chris Roberts was shared with DualShockers this week, as Star Citizen earns $141 million in crowd-sourced funding, putting the game as the most funded crowdsourcing project on the web ever. Roberts shared the developer’s plans and new features to be introduced in 2017, such as subsumption and procedural planets. He also acknowledges the positive fan reaction to the recent Alpha 2.6 release. The full statement reads:

There are many exciting things in store for Star Citizen this year. We’ll continue to modify and improve our game engine to better suit Star Citizen’s unique needs. Gameplay will get deeper as new systems come online to provide players the chance to do more than pew-pew. I also expect exciting advancements as we integrate our revolutionary tech, like subsumption and procedural planets, into the game. On the Community front, we’ll be releasing Spectrum, our new and improved community platform, and revamping our current shows and adding new ones in an effort to best communicate with all of you.

This week Star Citizen devs got back to work after some much deserved time off. Presently the Production Team is huddled with the different team leads updating and detailing out the tasks we have for this year. You’ll begin to see some of these details once we’ve had the opportunity to refine the Star Citizen and Squadron 42 schedules.

We were happy to see positive feedback from the Alpha 2.6 release and impressed by the number of stunning videos and images being created with the new camera controls. We have been digesting both our own and your thoughts on Alpha 2.6 now that it has been live for two weeks. We are planning releasing an incremental patch, 2.6.1 with some of the features that slipped out of 2.6, bug fixes for increased stability (although 2.6 was possibly our most stable patch to date) as well as continued balance and gameplay tweaks. Expect to hear more details on timing in the next couple of weeks.

2016 was a noteworthy year in Star Citizen’s development. 2017 with Squadron 42 and Alpha 3.0 is looking to be even better.

What do you guys think? What would you like to see Cloud Imperium Games do next as Star Citizen earns $141 million in backing? What features would you like to see in the game? Let us know in the comments below!

Be sure to stay tuned here for the latest crowdfunded games news, such as the new look at Battletech’s melee combat and the new zombie survival micro-game Bitten, here on Don’t Feed the Gamers!