It’s been almost exactly a year now since we reported on the announcement that Squadron 42—the single-player campaign portion of the now 12-year-old crowdfunding boondoggle Star Citizen—was “feature complete” and in the “polish phase.” Now, many years after the game’s original 2015 release target, developer Roberts Space Industries (RSI) says that, with just a year or two of additional “polish,” the game will finally launch sometime in 2026.
The announcement came during this weekend’s CitizenCon, per IGN, where RSI founder and CEO Chris Roberts showed off a roughly hour-long prologue of the game’s promised 30- to 40-hour storyline. IGN also reported that the live on-stage demo suffered “a number of crashes, bugs, and graphical problems,” which helps explain why a little more time is needed to get from “feature complete” to “actual release.”
“We did say we were doing it live, risking the demo gods, and they brought their wrath down on us,” Roberts said on stage, according to the IGN report. “Both the team and I are confident of giving you this game in 2026. Obviously, you can see it’s not going to be tomorrow because you saw a few crashes there.”