Star Citizen devs scale back roadmap to avoid timeline “distractions”

Enlarge (credit: Star Citizen)

Star Citizen developers Cloud Imperium Games' new public development roadmap will no longer include target dates for coming features more than one calendar quarter away. The change, the company writes, is largely to avoid "distraction" and "continued noise every time we shift deliverables" from "a very loud contingent of Roadmap watchers who see projections as promises."

It has now been just over nine years since Chris Roberts first raised $6.3 million in Kickstarter funds for Star Citizen, a haul that has grown to over $434 million in funding in the years since. Despite all that time and money, though, the game still only exists as a very rough Alpha version that's still missing many of the promised features that have slowly crept into the project during that time. The single-player spinoff game Squadron 42, meanwhile, has seen a planned beta delayed multiple times, with CIG COO Carl Jones recently saying it still might be "one or two more years" before the game is playable.

To help provide "more transparency" on the state of both games, RSI promised to overhaul its public roadmap in a way that would "utilize our internal sprint-tracking process to visualize our progress." When that new roadmap rolled out in late 2020, it came with a focus on a new, less time-sensitive "Progress Tracker" for each development team. That was alongside the traditional "Release View," which offered a quarter-by-quarter estimate for when new features would be implemented over the next 12 months.

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