Stars Reach is using every means possible to draw attention to itself. As well as the pre-alpha, which began with only a partial NDA and then dropped it entirely shortly after, there have been numerous interviews, livestreams and press releases.
If you have any interest in the game at all, it's likely you've seen some of the activity but one thing you might have missed if you're not actively signed up to the news feeds is Clere's Story.
Clere is the one person out of billions chosen to be Earth's emissary to an unidentified alien entity, for which she has to travel to Enceladus, one of Saturn's least-celebrated moons, leaving behind her daughter, Sofia, currently frozen in cryosleep to forestall an otherwise inevitable death from an ice-age disease released by climate change.
This fascinating backdrop to the in-development MMO comes in the form of two (So far.) chapters on the Stars Reach website. The story is very well-written. In parts it could be said to owe something of a debt to certain scenes in Kubrick's 2001 but I'd happily read it if it were a short story in a published collection.
I find it odd, then, that having taken the trouble to create the story, Playable Worlds is doing so little to publicize it. I only happened upon it by chance, when I was looking for something else on the game's Steam page. The first episode appeared there on 13 December, two days after it arrived on the official Stars Reach website.
The Steam version ends with the immortal tagline "To Be Continued" but for Steam users it hasn't been, even though Clere's Story Pt. 2 came out on the website just a week later, on 18 December. I haven't received any emails about the story and I can't find any mention of it on Discord either, although it needs to be said that I can't even find my own name on Discord, even when I get emails telling me someone's been talking about me there.
I don't imagine this lack of visibility for Clere's Story is doing Stars Reach any harm. This kind of world-building by way of long-form prose most likely only appeals to the already-committed.
It's rather sweet, when you stop and think about it. That companies bother with this kind of promotion at all, I mean. I guess they all have plenty of writers and would-be writers on tap, who'd be only too happy to spend a couple of hours knocking out a few hundred words of what might uncharitably be described as Authorized Fanfic.
They all do it, though, or a lot of them, anyway. Over at DCUO they've just begun a story featuring Batman (It's always Batman...), the first chapter of which is pedestrianly entitled "A Deadly New Mystery". I read it this morning and enjoyed it for what it is but it's not a patch on Clere's Story, which is both much better-written and has considerable emotional heft.
The DCUO tale, however, has the benefit of a much higher publicity profile. I head about it in a news story on MassivlyOP but if you google "DCUO "A Deadly New Mystery"" you'll get hits all the way across social media, from all of DCUO and Daybreak's accounts on YouTube, Instagram, X, Facebook and more, along with news stories from the likes of MMORPG.com. They even put it on Threads ffs!
It's not a fair comparison, of course. DCUO is a successful, established, long-running game and "A Deadly New Mystery" isn't just a one-off lore dump but the first entry in what they're calling a "Story Blog", part of the new content delivery system being rolled out for 2025. Still, the difference is striking.
Which got me wondering just how much Star Reach has penetrated the public consciousness or even that part of it that has any interest in online gaming. So I had a little look.
On Steam, the game has just over three and a half thousand "followers". It was news to me you could follow a game on Steam, which shows how observant I am. There's a button for it right there on the game's Store page. Stars Reach has one more follower now so we'll see if that gets me any notifications about new chapters in the story.
Wishlisting is something games always seem keen on so I checked that next. According to SteamDB, Stars Reach is #1099 of their 3,352 "Most Wishlisted" games. It doesn't give actual numbers but according to an anonymous survey of 125 game developers back in 2023, as reported by GameWorldObserver, it generally runs to a median average of twelve times the number of followers, meaning Stars Reach might feature on around forty thousand wishlists. Seems like a lot but who knows?
That's specifically Steam, though. How about a more general awareness? Google Trends is always good for that.
To give a little spurious perspective I added comparisons to a couple of vaguely relevant titles, Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen and Solasta 2. They don't really have anything to do with Stars Reach but they might appeal to a similar demographic and one has just entered Early Access, while development the other has only just been announced.
It's an interesting chart. It shows that in the last 90 days interest in Pantheon bubbled along quite consistently until the EA release on 13 December, when it sky-rocketed. Perhaps more significantly, interest has remained around the same level since and is even trending upwards. More evidence there that Visionary Realms' strategy is paying off.
Solasta was nowhere until, entirely coincidentally on the same day Pantheon went into Early Access, the public announcement was made about the game being in development. That drove it briefly above Pantheon in Google search but interest quickly fell back to a low mumble as fresh news died away.
That still puts it above Stars Reach which, other than a brief, unexplained blip on 3 November, doesn't even register in the comparison at all until 21 December, the day after the NDA was lifted in full. There is a blue line for a little while before that but on mouseover it comes up as zero.
All of which is, as they say in the gameshows, just a bit of fun. I have no meaningful understanding of how Google Trends operates so all I'm doing is looking at the pictures.
They do say a picture is worth a thousand words but in this case I'd say Clere's Story is worth a lot more to me than Google's charts. If it's any indication of the quality of the lore we're going to be able to enjoy in Stars Reach one day, I'll be a happy little space explorer.
It's just a shame such quality work isn't a little more prominent in the PR cycle right now.
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I feel like marketing in-development games is kind of a tight rope walk. You want to keep people interested but not SO interested that they get tired of hearing about the game before it comes out.
ReplyDeleteI was pretty interested in Stars Reach and threw my hat into the "please let me test" ring but no joy there and, being as petty as I am, now I'm started to feel a bit of resentment knowing so many people are enjoying the game and I'm on the outside looking in. Intellectually I understand why they are being very deliberate in how many people they let in, but emotionally I feel excluded.
So they may be developing this content but not really 'pushing it' until they open their gates a little wider and have the ability to allow more interested parties into the game?
That does make sense. I don't really have a clear idea how many people are in the testing program right now, either. When I had the Discord voice chat on it really seemed like maybe a dozen people doing all the talking, which was the main reason I switched it off. In terms of how many people I see, it feels like a few dozen at most but it's impossible to tell, really, since the sandbox nature of the thing means there's no real center to anything. The player-made town is the nearest it gets but while there are clearly quite a few people working on that, I never seem to see any of them actually doing it.
DeleteIt's also very hard to estimate how far from anything even as public as Early Access it might be. I'd say years still but again, with a sandbox, I find it much harder to judge. In theory, once the mechanics and systems work, I sduppose it could go live. It's not like someone has to create enough "content" to keep customers busy until the first expansion like a theme park would. At the moment the story on the website is about as much lore as we're getting and for all I know there may be no intention of adding much to the game itself, although I hope that's not the plan.