Star Citizen cheers on Elite: Dangerous

Star Citizen’s creator Chris Roberts has officially congratulated Elite: Dangerous on its successful launch on the Star Citizen website.

Writing on Roberts Space Industries, Roberts says how he has been a supporter of the Elite crowd funding project from the beginning and is delighted to see it launched.

’I know that many Star Citizen backers imagine there to be an intense competition between our game and Elite, but nothing could be further from the truth,’ said Roberts. ’The world is better off with more PC games and even better off with more space games. In the nineties there was plenty of room for multiple Space Sims and there is no reason that still can't be the case now!'

During the funding periods for both Star Citizen and Elite Dangerous, both Roberts and Elite developer David Braben promoted each others projects. Roberts also points out that he feels that Elite and Star Citizen are both taking sufficiently different approaches to the genre to be considered as unique projects.

Elite: Dangerous slipped the surly bonds of beta on December 16 this month and has launched to an encouraging critical reception. Prior to this, the sprawling open-universe space dsim had spend approximately one year in beta which was open to backers of the crowd funding project or anyone who wanted to buy in.

Star Citizen by contrast is still in development and is notable for having clocked up more than $66m in funds through its continued crowd funding activities. Star Citizen is expected to launch in 2016.