Get Ready for a Second Mortgage
Kyle Orland
– Jan 5, 2024 7:17 pm UTC
Enlarge / There aren’t many online game stores where you can spend $48,000 on a single “Add to Cart.”
At this point, over 11 years after we first wrote about Star Citizen, the still-in-alpha game is interesting less as something that might eventually be “finished” and more as a fascinating tale of feature creep and fundraising success. To that last point, we were suitably boggled at the recent news that Roberts Space Industries is now offering a $48,000 “Legatus Pack” as a “perfect collection” of “all ships released and concepted through [in-universe year] 2953.”
The collection of 187 ships (and hundreds of accessories like paint colors, skins, armor, and in-game posters) is now roughly two-thirds of the median annual household income in the US (circa 2022). But that price isn’t even available to lookie-loos like you and me; to add the package to an online shopping cart, you must first spend at least $1,000 to become a member of the game’s Chairman’s Club.
What a bargain!
While the newest Legatus Pack launched in late December, the offering isn’t a new concept for developer Roberts Space Industries. The first Legatus Pack launched in May 2018 for a relatively reasonable $27,000. Before that, similar “Completionist” packs of all in-game content released up to that point would run players up to $15,000.
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Fig. 1: Even accounting for inflation, the cost of a “complete” Star Citizen hangar keeps going up.
Ars Technica analysis
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Fig. 2: The number of ships available in Star Citizen‘s completionist Legatus Pack has been going up at a relatively constant clip over the years.
Ars Technica analysis
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Fig. 3: Adjusting for inflation, the per-vehicle average for Star Citizen‘s Legatus Pack has come down a bit in recent years.
Ars Technica analysis
Since the launch of that first Legatus Pack, which included 117 ships, RSI has updated its “complete” offering of in-game content in December of every year since 2019, upping the price and the number of ships included. An Ars analysis of those updates finds that, despite the sticker shock of the $48,000 package, the inflation-adjusted average price-per-ship has actually come down about 12 percent since peaking in late 2019 (the number of extra accessories included in the pack has also gone up from 163 in 2018 to 635 today).
It’s also worth remembering that this collection isn’t necessarily intended for individuals. In 2018, Cloud Imperium’s Eric Kieron Davis told Polygon that the Legatus Pack was something that “[some] players will use to deploy ships,