Following Facebook's $2bn Oculus acquisition, Star Citizen creator says he won't sell to a bigger company

Star Citizen has now raised over $41 million from public donations, and has the world record for the most money raised through crowdfunding. In the wake of Facebook acquiring Oculus Rift for $2 billion last week, many people have asked Star Citizen boss Chris Roberts if he intends to sell to a bigger company.

The answer? "Don't worry!"

"We have no plans nor interest in following this path," wrote Roberts in an update. "We don’t need to go to anyone with deep pockets to make our dream a reality. To mass-produce hardware like the Rift, you need an outlay of hundreds of millions of dollars. Luckily our ships are digital so we have hardly any cost of goods, just the cost of developing the universe of Star Citizen and running servers that Star Citizen’s universe will be simulated on. Thanks to the generosity of the Star Citizen community we have these two things covered."

"I’m having way too much fun building the universe of my dreams for everyone to adventure in! I’ve been down the big company acquisition route twice before and there’s a reason I am making Star Citizen totally independently!"

Roberts also spoke out to defend Oculus from claims of selling out following the $2bn acquisition, and continued to pledge his support to the fledgling VR headset.

"From the moment I first saw the Rift, I knew it was something special. I can tell you firsthand that the team behind the headset has a true passion for making VR tomorrow’s standard."

"In order for the Rift to succeed, it really needed a lot more funding than it has raised from its past two VC rounds. Hardware is expensive: it’s one thing to perfect the technology, but before you can sell a single Rift, you need to spend hundreds of millions on manufacturing and building a supply chain if you intend to make the Rift (and Virtual Reality) relevant for the mass market. Microsoft invested well over a billion dollars just to launch the Xbox One this fall! My hope is that Facebook’s funding will let Oculus compete with much bigger companies and deliver an attractively priced consumer headset at the scale needed for mass market adoption without the loss of the incredible passion that convinced me to back the project. I haven’t heard or seen anything to the contrary so until I do we are fully committed to supporting the Rift."

Star Citizen is currently due to launch in full sometime in 2015.