The Backing Of The Five Thousand: The Stars Reach Kickstarter Is Finally Over

And so the Stars Reach Kickstarter comes to an end and with it, perhaps, the deluge of emails swamping my inbox day after day. Maybe. Not sure about that. Someone at Playable Worlds really does love to write press releases. 

The campaign was set to close at seven in the evening, my time, yesterday. At just after four in the afternoon, I received my fifth email of the day from Playable Worlds directly or via Kickstarter, all updating me on the progress of the campaign and trying to persuade me to pledge. Which, of course, I already did, weeks ago.

"This is our last email before the end of our Kickstarter." the fifth email said but of course that didn't mean it was the last I was going to get. It wasn't even the last of the day. By the time I went to bed I'd had two more and when I checked my email this morning after breakfast there were two more. I'd had a dozen in twenty-four hours.

I think it's safe to say I have never been involved in any Kickstarter campaign that was as determined to put itself forward as this one and it hasn't stopped yet. Late pledges are still available "for those who did not hear about the campaign before it ended." although frankly I find it hard to believe there's anyone likely to be interested who hasn't already been made very well aware of the options. Not unless they've been in a coma or down a mineshaft for the last four weeks.

Yesterday, on and off, I watched the numbers go up throughout the day. I never realised you could see the dollars and the backers ticking up in real time as the pledges roll in. That must have been be a thrill ride on the opening day, when the campaign hit its target in the first hour. 

By comparison, the end wasn't exactly a flood but it was very steady progress. I haven't seen the graph for the full campaign but I'd guess it looks more like the traditional "U" than the "J" that's supposedly replacing it. The final total came in at $740,097 according to Kickstarter's official record but those late pledges have now tipped it over the psychologically significant three-quarters of a million. At time of writing it stands at $752,969.

We can debate just how successful that makes the campaign but there's no arguing with its success per se. Playable Worlds set a target, met it within the first hour and went on to more than triple it, maybe to quadruple it by the time the final late pledge comes in. They also set a secondary goal of five thousand backers and achieved it, the current total being 5,319.

Before the campaign started, I had a notional, minimum target of $1m in mind. Raph Koster had made it clear the purpose of the Kickstarter wasn't to raise all the remaining funds needed, which would be millions, but to prove there was sufficient interest so the project would become attractive to outside investors. When the $200k total was announced it seemed far too low to for that. Then, when the Kickstarter funded in less than an hour, it seemed clear the team had wildly underestimated the potential.

In the end, though, they didn't even get close to that million dollars that I thought ought to be their low-end ask. Instead, they tapped out just shy of $750k, which seems respectable, if not spectacular, especially in the current tough funding climate. Given that with forty-eight hours to go it didn't look nailed on they'd even get that much, I think you'd have to say the team probably got it just about right. Had they gone for the big seven figures, the campaign would have failed and that would have holed the whole project below the waterline.

In the event, the campaign did precisely what was intended. Raph certainly thinks so, anyway. The lengthy and detailed press release I received this morning quotes him as saying

“Our goal was to prove to the world that there was market appetite for this game, at a time when the industry financial landscape is challenging. We turned to players to help us make it happen and to provide that proof. And that approach worked: the success of the Kickstarter has already unlocked additional investment and set us on the road to Early Access later this year.”

A couple of other statements from the team added some interesting detail to that:

"We’re continuing to raise funds from both traditional and non-traditional sources to support development and expansion. We've been quite pleased -- and flattered! -- to receive offers to invest from several playtesters and close observers of Stars Reach in development.!"

"... several players of the pre-alpha asked if they could invest in the company. Last week we accepted a first investment greater than the total dollars from the Kickstarter."

I suppose I should be surprised to hear that one player in pre-alpha was so taken with what they saw they decided to stump up more than three quarters of a million dollars to push development forward. I should be but I'm not. Not really. 

As has been observed a few times before, there's something cultish about the whole Stars Reach project. It harks back to an era some people clearly see as a lost, golden age. Their lost, golden age. Rich people are wont to throw money at their dreams, especially when those dreams involve recovering their youth.

And that's fine. Money is money. But there's clearly an element of provenance involved, too. Sometimes it comes with strings.

Investors with a more direct stake in the eventual success of the game, seeing it not just as an investment but as something they plan to play, clearly bring a different kind of dynamic to the development process. Money men without the emotional involvement would presumably be more likely to sit back and let things go where they need to, just so long as it means a good return on investment.

Whether having highly committed players as major investors is going to be a curse or blessing remains to be seen. As does the game itself, most of which still exists only in outline. Particularly with the aggrssively short timescales. there's more than a whiff of the whole thing starting to spiral. 

The latest press release is very keen on making points about the ever-expanding possibilities:

"The current pre-alpha playtesting continues to be a revelation. The cooperation and meaningful iteration with players is the best thing that's ever happened to Playable Worlds and Stars Reach. Last week the players nearly invented the steam engine as part of their work with the cloud-powered underlying simulation that also included a working ice skating rink and a halfpipe skate park. Players have built seed vaults and test gardens and written whitepapers about the propagation of in-game plants. This kind of invention and discovery is only possible in Stars Reach, which is driven by proprietary AI simulation that enables novel gameplay as players interact with a world that reacts realistically to everything they do.. Players have redirected rivers, planted forests (and burned them down), and worked to build whole cities, including a replica of a Wild West town complete with a suspiciously familiar time-traveling car…"

Which is all very interesting but which also seems a long way from the game I thought we were testing. The further into this we get, the more it's starting to feel like Landmark In Space, albeit a version of Landmark where the underlying technology actually works.

One thing that came to light very late in the campaign was that the only way into the next phase of testing will be via a pledge at Reacher level or above. As one of the last emails put it:

"Only backers at the Reacher Tier and above will get full access to our game preview sessions after the end of the Kickstarter! "

Underlined, so you couldn't miss the implications. There was also a new pledge that nuanced access to give some backers priority over others. They really were working all the levers right at the end there.

As I've said a few times, the further we get into this thing, the less interested in it I find myself. I never thought it was going to be the game for me but now I'm not sure it's even going to be a game. Almost everything I read about it these days makes me feel less inclined to log in. If I wasn't in the testing process, I'm fairly sure I wouldn't now apply, even if anyone was taking applications, which they're not.

Frankly, almost all of it sounds like work and I don't just mean in the testing phase. The entire game as now envisaged looks very much like it should come under a heading my grandparents would have recognized and approved: making your own entertainment. 

I get that plenty of people find that liberating and exciting. I don't. I already have plenty of real-life projects that reward that kind of time and effort a lot more efferctively and which come with much more tangible and long-lasting rewards than anything I could expect to achieve by playing a video game. 

I would have felt differently twenty years ago but I don't look back on those days with a particularly warm and rose-tinted glow. It's more that the options available to me then weren't great. I have more and better choices now.

It will, nevertheless, be very interesting to see where things go from here. I have paid my $30 so I will be able to get hands-on time with whatever comes next. The schedule looks extremely... optimistic, shall we say. There could be fun times ahead.

A lot of promises have been made, that's for sure. A lot of hopes have been raised. Now comes the hard part: fulfilling them.

We'll see how that goes...