Hi everyone,
We have some very exciting news to share with you all. After more than a decade of fruitful partnership and years working together in the trenches to build something the industry has never seen before, we decided that it was time for CIG and Turbulent to finally and officially join forces. We entered into an agreement several months ago but have now completed the arrangement to merge our companies, with Turbulent formally joining the CIG family this past week.
We first met Turbulent’s CTO, Benoit Beausejour, and CEO, Marc Beaudet, back in November 2012. We had just launched our crowdfunding campaign and, not wanting to be beholden to Kickstarter, decided to build our own website that would allow us to continue our campaign as well as develop a platform to engage with our rapidly growing community.
As is well known, the initial response to the Star Citizen campaign was beyond any of our expectations; so much so that our quickly built site couldn’t handle the sheer interest of people backing the project! We opened a parallel campaign 10 days later on Kickstarter to help ease the demand on our site, but we realized we had seriously underestimated our need for a robust website with a scalable platform better suited to a much larger audience. Luckily, one of our early external development partners in Montreal introduced us to Turbulent.
Pretty quickly we realized that we were working with a talented, agile, and innovative web-development company. More than that, we found a group of developers who shared our ambition and vision to disrupt the industry.
The agility we needed at the start of this project (and that we still need today) didn’t faze Turbulent. They innovated solutions and, later in our relationship, invented new technologies, methods, and software to support our completely different approach to game development, whether it was supporting the incredible fluidity of our eco-system or enabling us to communicate and showcase our developers’ progress. Features such as our Concierge program, Issue Council, Telemetry system, Community Hub, Galactapedia, Roadmap, award-winning StarMap, and Spectrum social network are some of the public-facing elements that Turbulent built. And, behind the scenes, Benoit and his team started to help us publish features and functions, like our launcher, and in more recent times, the team has been a core part of our efforts on cloud services, Persistent Entity Streaming, and Server Meshing.
With Turbulent as part of the CIG group of companies, our headcount will be over 1,100, making us one of the largest independent game developers in the world! While this size and scale have enormous challenges, we are still looking to be a disruptive force in gaming, putting our community first and trying to do things differently; to innovate in all our business areas and make the best of the freedoms that come with being outside of the usual “consumer -> retailer -> publisher -> creator” paradigm, which stifles innovation and holds the industry back.
As we approach some of our biggest milestones to date, we’ve never felt better equipped to realize the unprecedented ambition of Star Citizen and Squadron 42, especially now that we have added the firepower, talent, and decade of camaraderie from Turbulent to the fold, alongside the best community of gamers in the world. CIG is on a unique journey and the team at Turbulent have been with us every step of the way, sharing our relentless passion for making the best damn game universe ever. We could not be happier to welcome them to our family of studios!
