How about that Stars Reach Kickstarter campaign then, eh? Have you been following that? I have, even if I haven't posted about it since it went live or logged in to any of the many playtests, at least a couple of which seem to happen every other day now.
As I write this, the total raised stands at just over half a million dollars. That's two-and-a-half times the ask with three weeks still to go. It sounds very impressive but I'm not wholly on board with all the back-slapping and high-fiving that's been going on.
Obviously it's far, far better to have smashed the target so quickly than to have failed to meet it by the end of the campaign but I suspect any marketing expert would be quick to point out the sheer speed at which it fell just means they didn't ask for enough. I'm not sure the big banner at the top of the page screaming "FUNDED IN LESS THAN 1 HOUR" is quite the brag they think it is.
I was certainly surprised by how low the target was. I was expecting a minimum seven figures. It's hard to see how $200k could either convince investors of pent-up demand or pay for a significant amount of further development.
But then, I'm just a player and a customer. All I know of development costs are the huge numbers I see quoted for the cost of bringing other, similar games to market. Tens, even hundreds of millions. This seems like pin money by comparison but I guess Raph and his team have been in the business long enough to know what they need. I hope so, anyway.
An interesting point of reference here might be Monsters & Memories, the indie game hoping, as so many have done before, to re-create the supposed glories of the Golden Age of MMORPGs. Or, more specifically, to remake EverQuest, which is very clearly what they're doing, even if they don't come right out and say so. It's even more Everquesty than the (Surprisingly successful.) Pantheon.
Niche Worlds Cult (Great name!) issues regular, incredibly detailed updates on how the game is progressing. I'm signed up and I got a press release just yesterday telling me, among many, many other things, that since work on the game began in 2020 they've spent $104,725 on development. Last year they spent $37,217.10.
NWC hopes to be "one of the most transparent companies in the industry" and they have a whole page on their website dedicated to laying out the exact costs in considerable detail. It makes for interesting reading, especially the part where they explain that the whole thing is being funded out of the pockets of the founders, that they have all the resources they need to finish it, and that therefore they don't need to raise any more from outside investors.
They do hope to make their money back one day but they seem sanguine even about that. M&M will eventually be a traditional subscription-based MMORPG and they say even "a small subscription base" will be sufficient to keep development rolling after launch.
Having played the game briefly during a few of the frequent open events, another of which is coming in April, I am astonished by just how much they've done for so little. Of all the retro-MMOs I've seen, quite a few now, this is the one I feel is the most likely to achieve its goals, both successfully re-creating that authentic early-MMORPG feel and also maintaining the necessary stability to keep it going.
M&M and that other stalwart of the retro scene, Project Gorgon, demonstrate that a few truly dedicated individuals really can make these kinds of pipe-dreams come true. More importantly, they prove it doesn't take millions, let alone the near-bankrupting of a whole state; it just takes a very clear game-plan, some realistic goals and the ability to focus on what can be done, not what would look oh so cool if only it could be done.
Where Stars Reach stands on the spectrum that stretches from the gritty, unspectacular sustainability of M&M and P:G at one end to the crash-and-burn object lesson of Curt Schilling and 38 Studios at the other remains to be seen. Right now, it feels as though there's a pretty solid base for a game in place but what's there still doesn't look all that much like the game that's being hyped - and boy, is it being hyped!
Rather than read yet another puff piece in the fan press or another of the gosh-wow press releases I receive pretty much daily now, yesterday I took a look at the latest version of Stars Reach's proposed development timeline on the Kickstarter page. It's very near the end of the long campaign statement so you may well have missed it. I had.
The timescales are even shorter than I realized. I already didn't see how they were going to hit their dates and that was when I believed there were still a couple of years to go before full launch. Instead, the campaign predicts Early Access by the summer, while the game is still in alpha. Beta would then follow before the end of the year and the full launch "in the first half of next year".
Does that sound realistic? I guess you'd have to be at Playable Worlds to answer that. As a tester, I'd say the current pre-alpha build is fun and it makes a good shop-window for the campaign but it bears little resemblance to the game as described in the Kickstarter.
Last time I played, there were just four planets. The full game is supposed include "thousands", but they are going to be procedurally generated so I suppose that's just a scaled-up version of what's there already. That doesn't apply to the political system or the economy, though or, crucially, spaceships, none of which are in the test build as yet. I'm not sure there's even a way to talk to other players in-game yet. There wasn't a couple of weeks ago.
The spaceships are the bridge too far for me just now. That sounds like a huge jump from anything that's in the game. They'll apparently be flyable either solo or with a crew and there will be "massive fleet battles". Until I read that yesterday, I wasn't aware the scope of Stars Reach was going to intrude upon the territory of EVE Online or Star Citizen. Seems I was wrong, although I guess it all depends on what they mean by "massive" and, for that matter, "crew".
However you look at it, it does seem like a heck of a lot to add in just nine months, by when the game ought to be in Beta and therefore "feature complete". On the positive side, and referring back to the very low target asked by the Kickstarter, maybe these aren't the kinds of problems you solve by throwing money at them anyway. I'm not sure having several million more dollars by the end of this month is going to make those massive fleet battles happen any faster.
It might even make things worse, if previous hugely successful campaigns are any guide. Feature creep and over-enthusiasm have killed plenty of similar projects or at least made them take a lot longer than they might have done had they had less money to throw around. At least the Stars Reach stretch goals don't look like they'll cause any unnecessary problems - so far they seem to be re-skins of existing assets or things that would have needed to be done anyway.
If all that sounds negative, I should mention that I threw in my $30 dollars on day one. I am a backer, or a "Reacher" if you prefer, since that's the title my $30 bought me.
It seems like a very low risk investment in a game I'm more and more convinced I'll never want to play much anyway. Even if Playable Worlds do somehow manage to hit all their marks (And the Kickstarter does end with the traditional caveat that "feature delivery may miss target dates."), I suspect I'll have already seen more than enough of Stars Reach by then.
I don't imagine I'll want to spend a huge amount of time playing Monsters & Memories, either. The further I get from 1999, the less I want to go back. Or 2003, either.
I would say, though, that there's a greater chance of me stumping up for a subscription to play a game that reminds me of EverQuest than there is of my buying a Property Pass to own a house in the heir apparent to Star Wars Galaxies, a game I never wanted to play to begin with.
Whether I want to play either game or not is irrelevant, anyway. I'd like to see both succeed, if only because a lot of people would clearly have a great time with them if they do. I just don't think I'm likely to be one of them.
I do enjoy writing about them, though. And I'm always happy to be proved wrong, if being wrong means I get to have a better time than I would have done had I been right.
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The chat window has been in game for quite a while. You need to bring it up to type /dance to heal other players, which is one of those things that makes the old SWG fans scream with glee and declare that Raph is remaking their lost game. The SWG fans who want everything the same as 2003 have been grating on me for a while.
ReplyDeleteI have a post about the game and its campaign queued up for tomorrow, which overlaps with a lot of what you said here. I haven't seen a spaceship yet, and I want a spaceship. But I am also wondering about what they have planned, if anything, to get through the doldrums of the middle-campaign.