Due to popular demand from potential backers, and to take some of the load off of their original in-house crowdfunding site, Chris Roberts and the Cloud Imperium team have launched a Kickstarter project for Star Citizen, their hopeful space epic PC game.

I am serious about listening to the opinion of this community, so when we asked whether you wanted a Kickstarter option on Facebook and had over 1000 affirmative responses we realized that we needed to provide that choice.

I’m a big fan of Kickstarter and have backed quite a few projects on it – including the Oculus Rift – and I think the core gaming community owes them a huge debt of gratitude for providing a mechanism to get games funded in genres that the modern day publishers aren’t interested in anymore.

...The kind folks at Kickstarter have generously offered to help out. Not only are they happy for us to have a Star Citizen campaign but they are fine running in parallel with the crowd funding platform on this site. This is great news, as it allows us to provide all the Space Sim fans out there multiple options to back Star Citizen. Nervous about pledging in a custom solution on a site that has had some hick-ups? Use Kickstarter! If you can’t as you don’t have an Amazon account and don’t want to open one, use the RSI site, where we take Paypal and credit cards. It’s all about user choice and in this adding Kickstarter is a very good thing.

A note from Roberts, and the video below further explain the decision, and the Kickstarter page can be found right here.

In its opening hours, the Kickstarter option has attracted over 2000 backers, and US$85,000 in pledges, and the original crowdfunding site currently stands at over US$1,04M, with a combined initial goal of US$2M.