Squadron 42 Finally Lands on Steam, 14 Years After It Was First Announced

Squadron 42 has a Steam page. Cloud Imperium Games opened wishlisting on October 10 for the cinematic single-player Star Citizen spin-off, more than fourteen years after it was first announced, and the store page still pegs the release window as Q2 2027.

The launch is the first concrete store presence for the game outside Cloud Imperium’s own Roberts Space Industries launcher, and it follows studio founder Chris Roberts’ decision last month to push Squadron 42 out of late 2026 to avoid the Grand Theft Auto VI launch window. In a September letter to backers, Roberts said he wanted the game to land when it could have the wider gaming world’s attention, writing that Squadron 42 “is truly something special, and so needs the opportunity to have the focus of the wider gaming world.” (Our GTA 6 release date and launch prep coverage has the broader November 19 picture.)

Squadron 42 puts players in the boots of a UEE Navy recruit. The UEE is the United Empire of Earth, the in-universe human government at war with hostile alien forces, and the year is 2945. Players are stationed aboard a capital ship on the front lines of a galactic war, working alongside a stacked Hollywood cast. The credits already list Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Gillian Anderson, Henry Cavill, Ben Mendelsohn, Andy Serkis, John Rhys-Davies, Jonathan Bailey, Mark Strong, Alix Wilton Reagan, Damson Idris, Liam Cunningham, and Jane Perry, with performances woven into gameplay as well as the cutscenes.

The Star Citizen universe has funded all of it. Cloud Imperium passed $1 billion in crowdfunding in May 2026 across roughly 6.5 million registered backers, per GamesBeat. The Squadron 42 Steam page lists a 150GB install, 16GB of RAM, and an Intel i7 / AMD Bulldozer-era quad-core CPU as the floor. The page confirms ten supported languages and that players will need a Roberts Space Industries account linked to Steam. It does not list a price yet. Squadron 42 will run on StarEngine, Cloud Imperium’s in-house engine.

Squadron 42’s development cycle is now longer than GTA 6’s. GamesBeat notes that GTA 6 spent about eight years in active development, while Squadron 42 has been in some form of development for fourteen years and counting. That puts it in the same conversation as the other marquee single-player games jockeying for the post-GTA 6 window, alongside the Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake for Switch 2 on November 5 and the long tail of October 2026’s packed release calendar that this game was deliberately stepped out of.

Our read: The Steam page is more procedural than revelatory, but it is the first time Squadron 42 has had a real discoverability surface outside the RSI launcher. The Q2 2027 release window is still a window, not a date, and Chris Roberts has pushed this game back before. If the slot holds, it is the last big single-player sci-fi shooter of the GTA 6 / Ocarina of Time remake year, and a $1 billion crowdfunded gamble that has to clear a very high bar.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report