Playable Worlds is, of course, the studio behind Stars Reach. In fact, SR is the only game they have.
Realistically, they don't really even have Stars Reach yet. It's still in pre-alpha, which sounds really weird now I say it out loud. I had to go check to make sure that was right. It felt like the game had to be at least in full alpha by now, but no, pre-alpha it is.
Laying people off before you even get to an alpha build does seem like a worrying sign. Hard to spin that as anything other than a crisis.
Maybe it's not that bad. I don't want to oversell it. It's difficult to know what to say about events like this other than to express sadness and/or concern and wish the departing devs well in their upcoming search for new roles elsewhere. However you rate it, though, it can't be good.
As I've said many times now, I don't think Stars Reach is likely to be a game I'll want to spend a lot of time with. It's just not my kind of thing. I thought for a while it might be but almost every new build made that feel less likely and now we have a fairly clear idea of what the finished game will look like, I'm as sure as I can be, at this very early stage, that I won't be playing any more, other than in a fit of passing curiosity.
Nevertheless, I do think it's one of the more convincing attempts to bring a completely new MMORPG to market we've seen for a while. The team seems to have a relatively well-defined goal and the leadership looks able to retain sufficient focus not to wander off and make something else entirely, something we've seen happen more than a few times in recent years. Just because I don't particularly want to play it myself doesn't mean I wouldn't like to see it do well.
Looking a little further, beyond my own personal preferences and sympathies, there's also the potential impact a failure here could have on the overall market for new MMORPGs. That's always assuming there is a market, something I think could be up for dispute.
People do keep trying. There are a surprising number of MMORPGs in development still, some in Early Access, others in various types of closed testing. Only a tiny handful could make any kind of claim to having a presence outside their own, specific niche, though, and Stars Reach would certainly have aspired to be one of that few.
Whether it ever was is another question but the last thing likely to boost its profile in the wider gaming market is news that the development team is being slimmed down before the game even hits alpha. Following the high-profile implosion of Ashes of Creation, it sends the worst kind of signal about how the genre is coping with the broader issues afflicting the entire gaming sector.
Without wishing to sound like a doom-monger, this does strike me as yet more evidence that the MMORPG genre as a whole is in steep decline. I wouldn't say terminal decline because I believe there's a substantial core audience that still prefers the familiar gameplay we've grown used to over the last twenty-five years to the pared-down, sped-up alternatives.
The problem for anyone hoping to enter the market with a new MMORPG is that the existing, core demographic is, for the most part, at least resigned, if not actively happy, sticking with the games they know. I suspect the more failures there are among the aspirants, the more strongly entrenched the incumbents will become.
None of which is to suggest Stars Reach won't be able to buck the trend. Raph is at pains to make it clear that development continues. He's also going to take a more direct role in that development, apparently. (See the two links above for all the relevant quotes - I won't pad things out by repeating them here.) That did surprise me a little. I presumed he was already calling the shots.
He also talks about recent builds in the pre-alpha having been buggy of late but he doesn't explain how letting people go is likely to improve things. I'd have thought it would get harder to release better-tested, less buggy updates if there were fewer people on the team but what do I know?
The team wasn't even all that big to begin with, it seems. Here's a quote Marketing Director Rick Reynolds gave to MassivelyOP last August:
"It’s not a big company. There are probably more people in chat right now than we have in the company, or it’s probably pretty close."
How many devs can they afford to lose? A fair question, perhaps, but unfortunately the real one is how many they can afford to keep.
The reason behind the layoffs is obvious: lack of funds. Raph doesn't go into details but he does talk about a need to be "prudent" in what Playable Worlds spends on developing the game in future. In an ideal world, you'd like to think developers and their accounting departments would be prudent in all circumstances but in the current financial climate I guess it's more of a necessity than an aspiration.
He's bullish about the future of Stars Reach, as you'd expect and as he has to be. Development will continue and there will be no reduction in scope, although some things that have been talked about may take longer to arrive.
And there's the real nub of the problem. MMORPGs already take a ludicrously long time to build. Stars Reach, as I said, is still in pre-alpha. Other games in the genre have taken five or even ten years to get from there even as far as Early Access, much less a genuine 1.0 launch. Anything that pushes those timescales towards the back end is very likely to see whatever interest there once was wane dramatically.
It is a bit of a Catch22. Pushing development faster costs money that may not be there. Slowing down risks potential customers walking away. Now the funding streams have largely dried up there's no easy way to find the necessary balance between financial security and getting the game finished in good time.
That said, it is possible. We have a shining example in front of us in the form of Project Gorgon. Somehow, a handful of developers and artists managed to steer that one through the rocks and rapids of lengthy development on a shoestring to the safe shore of a genuine Steam launch and a positive reception that saw the game land with a Very Positive rating and enough new players to require extra servers. And that after years in Early Access, too!
I hope Raph and his reduced team are able to pull off something of the kind. If they do, I probably still won't want to play the game but I'll be cheering it on from the sidelines.
I think a lot of people think highly of Koster, but I've always struggled to understand why we're supposed to have more faith in Stars Reach than any of the other ambitious crowdfunded MMOs that have pretty much all blown up by now. People used to think pretty highly of Chris Roberts and Mark Jacobs, too. Probably some still do.
ReplyDeleteProject Gorgon is, I think, of a different breed, as it never really seemed to want to be The Next Big Thing. It was always pretty clear about being a weird and quirky game for a niche audience -- a more realistic goal.
Raph just come across as less shady and more open to argument, I think. I don't like the one game he seems to want to make over and over but there's clearly an audience for it and he seems to be attempting to give them what they want, which seems fair enough. I do think any idea he has that he can break out beyond that fanbase is delusional, though. You're right that the PG team were much more realistic about their prospects, which is probably why they've succeeded on their own terms.
DeleteThe problem with MMOs that allow you to play pretty continuously even while in development is, by the time you go live, probably everyone who wanted to play has played it in some way. Valheim is still in Early Access, even. By the time it gets its 1.0 version, will anyone still remember it? Similarly, anyone who wanted to play Star Citizen has likely been playing already for years.
ReplyDeleteValheim is such an anomaly. It's still by far my most-played title on Steam. I feel like I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 for most of my life now but I've actually played it barely a third as long as I played Valheim. It's hard to see why the devs are even bothering to finish it at this stage. I can't imagine anyone is waiting for it to be done before they buy it! They'd be better off making a new game, surely?
DeleteI have a feeling that Stars Reach is going to be another Crowfall. It will hit release and then shutdown within a year or so. Even if they have hit upon a breakout idea, other, bigger companies will coop it. Just look at how Fortnite took over the Battle Royale genre without being a First Mover.
ReplyDeleteI'm also a believer you can show your game too soon. I keep remembering my own experiences with Hi-Rez's Paladins while that one was in beta. There was a stage where I really liked the game and how it was working, but the Hi-Rez kept changing things to the point I stopped playing and uninstalled it. I know Playable Worlds was trying to drum up word of mouth for the game to get support (read: funding money), but now Stars Reach feels like hearing about century old obituaries.
These days I think the best route is to do a Kickstarter when you are in a legit beta mode and launch your 1.0 or Early Access within a year. 'Opening the kimono' just wastes your hype-cycle opportunity in today's TikTok/Youtube/Twitch-timeframe world.
All of which, I am sorry for the devs, both laid-off and staying. It's a demoralizing time and its not going to be easy for either side to recover from this. :/
I think Project Gorgon's main reason for success in purely gameplay terms (As opposed to it having been really well project-managed.) is that it does actually have the traditional thousands of hours of gameplay the old school MMORPGs had, something I realized when I read The friendly Necromancer's posts on the game. If that's what people are looking for - and a lot say it is - then they won't be disappointed.
DeleteBy contrast, most MMORPGs seem to launch with barely enough content to keep people busy for a month, far less a year. They all have that "Level fast then do repeated dungeons/missions/dailies until your eyes bleed" structure and I don't believe it's as popular as they think it is. Where Stars Reach stands on that continuum is hard to figure. I think it wants to be a sort of open-ended sandbox but it doesn't really feel or indeed look like one. I suspect it might fall between two genres. At least two.
I think if you can design and budget for a game that you expect to have maybe a thousand active players, there is still a very solid market for that. Expecting to even do second tier succesfull MMO numbers, like LoTRO, DDO or SWTOR, is no longer realistic. I think the biggest issue is the one you point out. It takes an absolutely insane budget to build out even a few months of content with high production values.
ReplyDeleteI feel like Raph is trying to get around that by incorporating a bunch of sandbox tools so the the players can kind of generate their own fun. However, it's not clear that the potential audience is in line with the budget he has been going through. Especially for a new intellectual property that doesn't have a really strong sense of identity to me, at as a complete outside judging solely on what I have seen screenshots of an read about.
To me it looks kind of random. "Fantasy looking races, but in space. Space tech that looks like a straight to Netflix cartoon for children." Unless you are just dying for the next iteration of sandboxes, I'm not really seeing a lot there to draw someone in. The only reason I've followed it at all is becuase I have a lot of respect for Raph, and I want to see what he's up to. If it ever does launch, that is the only reason I might try it.
That's a great summary of the identity problem Stars Reach has - it's so generic. It looks pretty enough but nothing has any character or personality. There is some lore but it's thin and, to me, quite off-putting. They've gone for a peculiarly negative "You messed up and now we're doing you a big favor letting you try to make up for it" vibe that seems completely at odds with what almost all gamers seem to like in backstory, namely that they're important or special in some way.
DeleteWithout an established IP to feed off, it's hard to see how that's going to play well to any audience outside the ex-SWG fancore and even then it has to compete with the actual SWG emulator scene, which is well-established and successful. I'm sure SR can attract and hold a few thousand loyalists but whether that could ever be enough to support its very ambitious goals is highly questionable.
Raph Koster huffs his own farts. That's all anyone needs to know about anything he says or does. The whole team seems like a bunch of sexual perverts and intellectual midgets.
ReplyDeleteI bow to your superior inside information! All I know is what I see in the PR and press...
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