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We're a company of near or over a thousand people, but there's still a limited number of engineers and programmers, and you've also got Squadron 42 with a 2026 target. So what is this split like? Is this just an even 50-50 split? Is it 60-40? Is it hard? Is it flexible? Are there Joker cards that bounce between the projects?

TL;DRThe split between Star Citizen and Squadron 42 isn't an even 50-50 and no exact percentage is given; some engineers are dedicated to Squadron 42, with others flexing between projects at milestones.

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

So that's an interesting question because we are making two games. There's some good news, right? Because a lot of the gameplay systems that power the actor and that power the core of the game are the same between the two games. And so improvements on one end result in improvements on the other one, plus or minus the online versions of these features, right? Let's say we take one team, which is the most important in this one, like the gameplay teams. That's where we have to be more fine-grained. There's this thing that we have to be careful about, which is context switching. Obviously, building a single-player cinematic game and building a multiplayer MMO-like game are similar, but the context switching between the two projects costs time. So you want to find a scheme where you have the resources on what you're trying to achieve at each milestone. Like Squadron 42 has its internal milestones and its cadence that it needs to respect this year, which is extremely aggressive, in order to get a game completely complete by the end of the year and ready for '26 release. And so there are resources that are more suited to the type of things that Squadron 42 kind of needs right now in its polish phase and its finalization phase for all the levels and all the chapters. And so obviously these people will be favored to work on Squadron 42. So there's a series of people that are on there. I don't have an exact percentage, but it's not 50-50, because there are also things that are built on the PU that are beneficial on that side. If Jens was here with me, he would say the thing we need is flex. Flex is when we need reinforcements, we can get them. We have a model now where there are a series of engineers that will work dedicated to Squadron. But we can flex on both sides depending on the milestones. And the two projects now have a cadence that's adjacent. And so we kind of know at every milestone what Star Citizen needs and what Squadron needs. And so we can flex accordingly. And a lot of those features are similar on both ends. And some of the bug fixes that we need on SC are also needed on both sides, especially actor-related bugs. It's a tricky balance, right?

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Published on this date.6 Feb 2025