Star Citizen continues to be an ongoing, public experiment in crowdfunding as it has reached $66 million in funds since its 2012 Kickstarter that netted the game a seed of $2.1 million. The most recent push, coinciding with the Black Friday holiday, jumped the game’s funding by $4 million in just over 13 days. The property, published by Cloud Imperium Games, has become a major feature of video game reporting because of its staggering success for a game that is still in development.

Chris Roberts, video game designer who is famous for the Wing Commander series, brought Star Citizen into a market hungry for a new breed of space simulator games and the public rewarded him for it. While the game has been in development for two years it has continued to earn funds from crowd campaigns at a staggering rate.

Looking to be many things to many people, Star Citizen promises to be an immersive space combat, trading, and exploration video game as well as offer a first person shooter experience. While part of the game may take place on the ground, what really drives the funding is the space ships.

Chart of Star Citizen funding for November published by /u/Nehkara on Reddit.

Since the Kickstarter, Star Citizen backers were offered the ability to buy virtual dogfighters, explorers, and merchantmen. These packages can cost anywhere from $20 to $350 and beyond. The recent round of Black Friday sales offered up a staggeringly priced $2,500 capital ship called the Javelin Destroyer in limited quantities. While most of the relatively cheap ships are single or double-person craft, the Javelin is an extremely large vessel that will require an actual crew.

The stretch goals keep coming

One of the draws of crowdfunding is to trigger a sort of sympathetic reaction from people who have pledged money to back a campaign via rewards that increase as funding increases. This is the basis of how Kickstarter campaigns encourage funders to keep going after goals have been met and is also the core of the Star Citizen virtual space ship dopamine reward system.

Backers who get in earlier get more rewards and as the numbers climb more and more things get added to the eventual game.

Some of the past stretch goals have suggested new solar systems to explore in the depths of space, the addition of new ships, increased customization, even the promise of procedural generation for the universe. The project has been so successful at funding new stretch goals get added almost monthly to keep up. At $64 million pets were unlocked for players—before there was an aquarium and fish available but now space cats are a thing.

Players are still speculating as to what the $65 and $66 million stretch goal rewards will become.

Photo credit: Star Citizen logo, Cloud Imperium Games.