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People have been creating and managing orgs on our website since 2013, and this is 2026, and those orgs are still not in game. When, Benoit? Give me something social.

TL;DRA dedicated social strike team now exists, with the Comlink app and chat overhaul first (aimed at 2026, no patch named), then party finder, then moving website orgs into the game.

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

A Social Universe, right? The last panel that we did at CitizenCon outlines the vision of what we want to do with social. Now, with the year that we just had, we had to take a little bit of a detour on that initial plan. But right now, we have completely formed the social strike team. A bit like the heroes team, the social strike team's only mission is to execute this plan.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

So don't bury the lede. There is now an official dedicated team on this.

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

Social strike team, yes. Exactly. And so this group is currently looking at all of the components that make up the social systems now. Fortunately for us, the work didn't stop on this side, even though we couldn't enact the changes in the game. On the back end side of things, there's been a lot of progress on social. And so even though the systems look primitive in game, their capabilities have grown quite a bit, even in '25. So we do have a block list that we leverage now. It's simplistic because we didn't have the UI resources to do it completely. But moving into this, the strike team covers all areas of social. The plan is to go into four different pillars for it. So the first order of business is the Comlink app. So the Comlink app is one of the oldest mobiGlas applications we still have. It's kind of an eyesore because it's from the days of future past. It's from, I want to say 1918 at this point, style-wise. Very old technology, still uses the legacy UI framework that we had in the game. We're completely eliminating that tab. We're bringing forward the social application that we've shown at CitizenCon, so that design is moving forward. So replacing that, the chat widget, right? So the entire chat experience in the game, we're completely overhauling this from the top at the moment. So we're right in the process of changing that and hooking it up to the new systems. Revamping things like social notifications. Currently in our mobiGlas we only have one kind of level of notification, which is ultra important. So to have a proper social experience, you need to have these system updates, system notifications, like someone joins, someone leaves, whatever. Looking at things like combat log and all this stuff that we've looked at in the Social Universe panel. So we're actively building this now. And that's going to be the first, I'm not going to say which patch it's going to land in. So our schedule is twofold. There's a content patch schedule and there's a feature schedule. The features need to have leeway because it depends on where they're going to land. But the first update to social will be the Comlink app. So rich party information, friend info tracking, chat app. So we're working on this right now actively.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

For a 2026 release?

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

Yes. I mean, like you mentioned, it's kind of urgent at this point that we do something there. The next milestone for the social strike team is going to be looking at the party finder mechanic, right? Which basically allows you to advertise your party and then get people to join in. Let's say you're looking for a gunner and some FPS guys for your mission, then you can advertise that; if you're looking for friends to go do a specific event, you can do that as well. And so Party Finder, we're hoping, is going to be a way for you to find friends on a given shard really rapidly. Tie that in with your friendships and your contacts. So we're building on the first release, which will have friend info tracking, into that. And so that's going to be super interesting. That's the second system we want to bring in. And then number three of four is the org system. And so in that space, we're taking the orgs on the website from 2013 and we're moving them completely. Obviously, the technologies we used to build that in 2013 are obsolete. It's a really old system. So we're bringing all of this data back into a game service to manage orgs. To surface that, obviously, game side. So now have org management screens, have your organization chat in the game, and then actually be able to create your organization from the game as well, as well as surface it outside. So that's like, okay, now orgs are in the game.

Jared HuckabyHost, Community

That's the whole name and then the org, you know?

Benoit BeausejourChief Technology Officer

Yeah, exactly. And this will probably, I mean, we're still having internal discussions about how that surfaces. In our game, nothing is always set in stone, but it's probably going to tie into FPS scanning, radar, additions to when you fly your ship to identify others with scanning. And so the orgs will be part of that. Visibility in game, chat in game for your orgs, actually having your organization communications.

Star Citizen Live›Tech Talk with Benoit Beausejour·
Published on this date.5 Feb 2026