One Of The Most Expensive Games Ever Is Free To Play For Two Weeks

For 13 years, one developer has been promising to build a fully simulated galaxy in one of the most ambitious massively multiplayer games ever. After all that time, and several hundreds of millions of dollars from eager players, you still can’t fully explore that game, which has yet to even announce a release date. But for the first two weeks of July, you can at least pop your head in and take a look around at what its lengthy, expensive development has wrought so far.

It’s been so long since the announcement of Star Citizen that its name no longer even elicits the sense of wonder that it once did, or the exasperated eyerolls it did after that. These days, most people would be hard-pressed to even remember that the game exists until prompted, let alone recall any of its wildly lofty promises.

Spearheaded by Chris Roberts, creator of the classic Wing Commander series, Star Citizen was announced in 2012 with a Kickstarter campaign that raised around $2 million. The game was meant to be an MMORPG that let players freely zip around in space, living as traders, mercenaries, or however else they chose in a game meant to launch in 2014. Instead, that year saw the release of Arena Commander, one of several independent “modules” that developer Cloud Imperium Games has released, showcasing various aspects of the game that will, one day, supposedly, be connected into one seamless universe. There’s also the first-person shooter Star Marine, the open-world Persistent Universe, and the exciting Hangar module, which is essentially a giant garage where you can look at the spaceships you own up close.

And when I say the spaceships you (as opposed to your character) own, I mean it. Aside from the sheer amount of time it’s taken for any part of it to come to fruition, the most controversial aspect of the game’s development has been the selling of digital ships for real-world money. That might not seem terribly odd, given the prevalence of paid DLC, until you remember that the game isn’t out yet, many of the purchasable ships are still being added to the modules that do exist, and they can cost you several hundred dollars each. In 2023, Cloud Imperium even rolled out a package including most of the game’s nearly 200 ships plus a bundle of cosmetic options for a whopping $48,000. Yes, all three of those zeroes are intentional. As of June 2025, Star Citizen has raised more than $845 million from backers.

So what does $845 million and 13 years of development add up to in Star Citizen right now? Hell if I know, but you can find out for yourself during the Free Fly event, running during the annual in-game Foundation Festival until July 14. The idea behind the Foundation Festival is to get new players into the game, helped this time by a newly updated referral program that offers rewards to new players who shell out for full access to the game — whatever that means at this stage of development — and to the players who invited them.

To be clear, I’m not recommending you do that. The referral program is frankly extremely sketchy, encouraging players to bring in as many new customers as they can. I can’t even necessarily recommend the Fly Free weeks as a good time, because when I tried it last year, I found the introduction it offered to Star Citizen so confusing, and the performance of the game so terrible, that I could barely manage to get the hangar to ooh and ahh at the ships on display before it crashed and I decided it wasn’t worth my time.

On the chance that it’s performing better this time, though, I do think it could be worthwhile to boot up the free version and poke around, if only for the novelty of it. Development times in mainstream games are getting longer and longer as their budgets balloon at the same rate, but Star Citizen is on another level. It’s morbid curiosity, sure, but I’m curious nonetheless about what’s been produced so far by such a gargantuan and expensive undertaking. Besides, if you want to wait until it’s finished to take a look, you could be waiting a long time.

Star Citizen is free to try on PC until July 14.