PC space sim Star Citizen funding reaches an astonishing $39 million

[UPDATE] Following the publication of this story, Chris Roberts announced that if funding reaches $40 million, Cloud Imperium Games will assemble a team to work on bringing procedurally generated content to Star Citizen.

"This stretch goal will allocate funding for Cloud Imperium to develop procedural generation technology for future iterations of Star Citizen," Roberts said. "Advanced procedural generation will be necessary for creating entire planets worth of exploration and development content. A special strike team of procedural generation-oriented developers will be assembled to make this technology a reality."

"Star Citizen isn't just about the game we launch with. We're going into this building not only an immersive launch experience, but the platforms and the tools to let us keep expanding the game to meet the available technology," he added. "The game won't be a static experience: we want to build Star Citizen in a way that the experience will be fresh in five years, ten years and into the foreseeable future."

For reaching $39 million, players have now unlocked the UDS-2943-01-22 system. You can read more about this system on the game's website.

The original story is below.

The crowdfunding campaign for Chris Roberts' upcoming PC space simulator Star Citizen continues to reach new heights. The game has now raised an astonishing $39 million, which is up from $38 million two weeks ago, and $37 million at the end of January.

More than 394,000 people have backed Star Citizen, which is due to launch sometime in 2015. Roberts previously teased that if funding hit $39 million, developer Cloud Imperium Games would announce a "new goal that will help chart the course for the future of Star Citizen in a different way." We'll update this story when Roberts officially announces the new goal.

Star Citizen is already the most successful crowdfunded project in history from a dollars perspective, easily surpassing the next closest competitor: the Pebble Watch ($10 million).

To put Star Citizen's new funding milestone into context, Epic Games revealed in 2006 that development on the original Gears of War cost $10 million, while Tim Schafer's 2008 action game Brutal Legend had a budget of around $25 million.