MCV Develop 974, dated January 2022 has a profile of Cloud Imperium Games and the Star Citizen/Squadron 42 project. The title of the article on the crowdfunded space games is called "Star Citizen: Its Five Year Mission." Obviously this is a play on Star Trek, but it bears noting that development has gone on for well over five years now (as well as longer than the Apollo moon project). And as highlighted on Wccftech, the waiting will continue, as there are quotes that indicate Star Citizen is not likely to move out of the alpha stage anytime soon. Interestingly, however, COO Carl Jones is also already referencing sequels. Word on the single-player Squadron 42 project is tough to decipher. Jones is non-committal, but seems to indicate Chris Roberts relocating to the UK for a stretch means it's possibly just two years out. "I guess we'll see how long he needs to be over. But yeah, it could be one or two years more," says Jones. "He's spending more time over here with the Squadron 42 team and with our other developers, but it'll be this year when he moves over for longer periods of time. Hopefully that means we can progress Squadron 42 through to completion faster. We want to get that game finished, but it will be finished when it's ready." As for Star Citizen, we're presented with a scenario where five years from now it is operating as a "very large" MMORPG:

However, the news last November that CIG's main development studio in Cheshire would be moving to Manchester's Enterprise City, site of the old Grenada Studios, with a view to expanding operations to 1000 staff within five years, seemed to suggest that while we may never know where Star Citizen will end up or what state it will be in when it gets there, we can at least put an ETA to what that that might be: Five years from now, if our maths is correct, is the year 2027.

"I think by that time we'll be operating a very large MMORPG," says Carl Jones, CEO of Cloud Imperium Games. "So there will be a lot more publishing resources, a lot more games masters, more player support. That may require us to open facilities in other locations. At the moment we don't have any major Asia Pacific presence and that's probably something that will have to come in the long run, because if your game explodes over there, then you really need to start building up teams to service that. Jones suggests while the potential to expand the new Manchester studio beyond its planned 1000-person capacity exists, the world is practically CIG's oyster. It might be Europe or the US that CIG heads to next period the point is that CIG will increasingly resemble an online publisher, "we'll still have huge development resources, because by that time will be developing the sequel and sequels for Squadron 42."