Star Citizen is free for the next few days, please don't accidentally buy a $300 spaceship

My love of the chilly, lightless heavens is equalled only by my love of free things, and right now, Star Citizen ticks both boxes. Cloud Imperium are offering free access to the long-in-the-making space game until July 19th, as part of the latest Foundation Festival. During that fleeting window of opportunity, you can try out 10 ships and enjoy such astral pastimes as stripping wrecks, busting asteroids, or getting blown up by other pilots. If you're an existing citizen of the stars, there are also festival-themed discounts of various kinds.

I have nothing to add about the promotion itself, so instead I will reiterate that Star Citizen has been gestating for longer than most actual stars [citation needed]. It went into preproduction in 2010, was announced in 2012, and was once fondly slated for release in 2014. It has garnered hundreds of millions of dollars in crowd-funding over the years, with players recently invited to splurge an entire housing deposit's worth of pocket money on starships which, the attentive reader will notice, are not physically existing vessels you can live in when you're old and penniless. There are a few of those ships on offer as part of this year's Foundation Festival. For example, a snackable £120 nets you the C1 Spirit, a "versatile cargo hauler". If you dislike the colour of your C1 Spirit, you can buy a pack of paintjobs for a scandalously cheap £24 or so - 30% off the usual asking price.

Alec Meer (RPS in peace) wrote a Star Citizen explainer in 2015 which now reads like a sparking terminal diary looted from one of the aforesaid derelicts. "No-one outside of [CI founder Chris Roberts] and his team know what's really going on, or whether Star Citizen can possibly live up to the expectations, the money, the dreams," he wrote. "And that is what Star Citizen is: the great unknown, even after almost three years." I dread to think what Alec, who has long since hyperspaced to sunnier pastures, would have made of this news article, had I managed to transmit it back through time. I can only hope that 10 years from now, somebody at RPS will have reviewed the 1.0 version.

I myself haven't yet played any version of Star Citizen, but I've heard the current build is actually quite full-featured - as of October 2023, its single-player component Squadron 42 was "feature-complete", and Graham thinks the sweat looked nice in the last round of footage. I'll be giving it a go later. I'm less enthused about Cloud Imperium's recent treatment of an autistic programmer over his work-from-home request.