Squadron 42 Is on Steam for Q2 2027. After 12 Years and $1 Billion, Will It Actually Ship?

Squadron 42 is real, it has a Steam page, and it has a release window: Q2 2027. That’s April to June next year. On 10 October, Cloud Imperium Games dropped a new trailer, “The Oath”, opened wishlists on Steam and rolled out its famous cast. For a single-player game first promised for 2014, that’s about as close to “it’s actually happening” as we’ve ever seen.

The catch? We’ve been here before. A lot.

What CIG showed

• The story: it’s 2945 and the United Empire of Earth is on the verge of collapse. You enlist as a rookie in the UEE Navy, serve aboard a capital ship, and work your way up to the front line of a galactic war.
• The gameplay: the trailer mixes cinematic cutscenes with first-person shooting on foot and space dogfights. CIG says you’ll also sneak through enemy territory and make big story calls with your crew.
• The cast: Gary Oldman as Admiral Ernst Bishop, Mark Hamill as Lt. Cdr. Steve “Old Man” Colton, Gillian Anderson as Captain Rachel MacLaren, plus Henry Cavill, Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, Andy Serkis, Ben Mendelsohn, John Rhys-Davies, Jonathan Bailey, Damson Idris and plenty more.
• The Steam page: Windows only for now. Minimum specs are Windows 11, 16GB of RAM, a graphics card with 8GB of VRAM and 150GB of storage. It also lists a broadband internet connection, which is worth keeping an eye on for a single-player game. No price yet.

About that “new cast”: most of the headline names aren’t new. Oldman, Hamill, Anderson, Serkis, Strong, Cunningham, Mendelsohn and Rhys-Davies were first announced at CitizenCon back in October 2015. As one Polygon commenter put it, “I remember when Star Citizen bragged about getting Gary Oldman for Squadron 42 over ten years ago.” What’s new is seeing them all in a proper release trailer with a date attached.

The first hands-on

CIG flew a group of backers and content creators to Manchester on 9 and 10 October to play about five hours of the game. They’re under NDA, so there’s no footage, but impressions are out. Wccftech’s round-up describes “cautious optimism”:

• The good: excellent facial animation, busy NPCs who feel like they live on the ship, enemies that flank you and revive their mates, punchy hit feedback, great sound, and impressive ship destruction from CIG’s Maelstrom tech.
• The less good: lots of slow, heavily directed cinematic sequences, a fairly linear structure, and bugs. If you’re expecting Star Citizen-style freedom, this isn’t that.

How much money are we talking?

As of today, Star Citizen’s official funding tracker sits at US$1,050,982,366 from 6.73 million accounts. That’s crowdfunding only, mostly ship and game package sales, and it doesn’t include outside investment in the company. For scale:

• The original 2012 Kickstarter raised just over US$2 million.
• In May 2026 alone, backers spent US$44.6 million, according to the same tracker. A normal month lately is around US$8 million.
• The top-end Legatus pack bundles 175+ ships for US$48,000, and you have to have already spent big to be allowed to buy it.

Squadron 42 and Star Citizen share that money and the same studios. In his August letter, Chris Roberts said CIG has 611 developers across four studios (outside its live content team). The split has been roughly 50/50 for the last couple of years, and it’s now 55/45 in Squadron 42’s favour to get it finished.

A very long road

• 2012: The Kickstarter promises Star Citizen, with its single-player campaign, by November 2014.
• 2015: The Hollywood cast is announced at CitizenCon. Squadron 42 is meant to arrive that year.
• 2016: A 2016 window comes and goes, and the game is delayed indefinitely.
• 2018: A public roadmap targets a beta by early 2020. It slips to Q2 2020, then Q3 2020.
• December 2020: Roberts says no more dates or gameplay until it’s close.
• October 2023: At CitizenCon, CIG declares Squadron 42 “feature complete” and in its polish phase.
• October 2024: CitizenCon announces a 2026 release.
• 2025: Squadron 42 skips CitizenCon entirely so the team can focus on hitting 2026.
• 27 August 2026: Delayed again, to Q2 2027.
• 10 October 2026: Steam page, trailer and hands-on.

The reason for the latest delay was GTA 6. “Our plan was to release in Q4 around IAE,” Roberts wrote, but “there is no way I want to launch my spiritual successor to Wing Commander, a game that has had twelve years of blood, sweat and tears invested into it… into the attention buzz saw of GTA6.” Fair enough. But GTA 6 lands on 19 November, and Q2 2027 is five to seven months after that. As PC Gamer pointed out, that suggests CIG just wants more time.

The controversies

Twelve years and a billion dollars attracts some baggage:

• Refunds: In 2016, CIG changed its terms of service to remove an 18-month refund clause. Refund fights have followed ever since, and a 2019 Forbes report found the US Federal Trade Commission had received 129 complaints about the company.
• The Crytek lawsuit: Crytek sued CIG in December 2017 over its use of CryEngine, arguing the licence covered one game, not Star Citizen and Squadron 42. The two settled in February 2020 on undisclosed terms.
• Selling ships that don’t exist yet: In 2021, the UK Advertising Standards Authority upheld a complaint about how CIG marketed concept ships.
• Layoffs and crunch: CIG cut jobs in February 2024 and again that November, and several senior executives were reportedly let go in December. Insider Gaming also reported an internal email “mandating extra time”, including seven-day weeks, in the run-up to CitizenCon 2024. It was described as temporary.
• Star Citizen itself: the MMO has been playable in alpha since 2017 and is still dogged by bugs. A recent livestream was so laggy PC Gamer called it “disastrous”.

So will it actually come out in Q2 2027?

Reasons to believe: it’s been feature complete for three years. There’s a public Steam page with a window on it, which is a much harder thing to walk back than a slide at CitizenCon. Outsiders have now played five hours of it. And CIG has a big reason to finish: Roberts says the sooner Squadron 42 ships, the sooner most of the studio moves on to Star Citizen 1.0.

Reasons to doubt: literally every previous date. “Q2” is a window, not a release date. The last delay cited GTA 6 but added months beyond it. And the hands-on still turned up bugs, three years after the game went into polish.

Our take

This is the most real Squadron 42 has ever looked. A Steam page, a window, and people outside CIG actually playing it is a long way from a concept trailer at CitizenCon. But the gap between “the most real it’s ever looked” and “out” has swallowed this game before.

Our guess: it comes out in 2027. Whether that’s April or October is another question, and we wouldn’t bet the Legatus pack on Q2. If it does land, and it’s anywhere near as good as the cast and the budget suggest, it’ll be one of the biggest space games ever made. Until then, wishlist it, keep your expectations in low orbit, and maybe don’t buy the US$48,000 bundle. Thoughts? Let us know in the comments or on the Discord.

Sources: Polygon, Steam, RSI funding tracker, PC Gamer (delay), Massively OP (Roberts letter), Wccftech (hands-on), TechRaptor (feature complete), Kotaku (Legatus), PCGamesN (Crytek), 80.lv (executives), CGMagazine (layoffs, crunch email), Wikipedia (timeline, refunds, ASA).