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“It was only natural that the next step be to join forces.”
Star Citizen developer Cloud Imperium Group has acquired the Montreal-based studio, Turbulent.
Turbulent and Cloud Imperium have been collaborating together on Star Citizen since 2012.
The acquisition means that Cloud Imperium now has over 1100 people “around the world working on its ambitious projects”, including Austin, Frankfurt, Los Angeles, Manchester, and Montreal, and all 189 Turbulent employees will “remain in place”. The studio’s current management team will also remain in situ.
“We enthusiastically welcome Turbulent to our family of studios, as an integral part of our Star Citizen development,” said CEO and founder of CIG, Chris Roberts.
“Fundamentally, we recognise the shared cultural values and passions between our two companies, which have helped create a natural synergy and development pipeline for our joint projects over the past decade.”
“After more than a decade of shared success, it was only natural that the next step be to join forces,” adds Benoit Beauséjour, co-founder of Turbulent.
“The Montreal and Quebec gaming and tech industry benefit from this transaction, which serves to reaffirm the depth of talent to be found here. And we will benefit from the expertise of a huge global network of CIG talent while our studio team will now be able to work on projects that are international in scope.”
Star Citizen has now raised more than half a billion dollars in funding from backers. As Matt recently summarised for us, its exceedingly lengthy development is well-documented with the game still in alpha over a decade after production began. And while it’s attracted some private funding in that time, the overwhelming bulk has come via crowdfunding, beginning with a successful $2m USD Kickstarter in 2012 and ballooning from there.
Cloud Imperium Games was forced to apologise to Star Citizen players earlier this year when the release of a new update attracted enough players back to the game that login and server issues have become a major problem for the developer.
That March update makes steps towards the game’s ideal of full in-game persistence, with the addition of Persistent Entity Streaming tech now implemented in Alpha 3.18. It means objects can be dynamically tracked when moved by players.
