When Raph Koster started talking in Discord on Saturday night, I was super annoyed because I knew I was going to lose my whole evening to writing about Stars Reach. But by the end of the fireside chat, I was buzzing with the feeling that our genre might finally be on the edge of a revolution – and I don’t mean because of the Kickstarter or the game mechanics.
It’s because of the demographics.
See, Koster has said before that Stars Reach is not necessarily gunning for just the old-school hardcore MMORPG sandbox fanbase. The stylized graphics and availability of shorter game sessions should be your first clue that he wants a bigger base than just, well, us. Don’t take my word for it; Playable Worlds said as much last June when it first announced the game.
“Stars Reach is set in a colorful, optimistic science-fantasy setting that appeals to a wider audience than just the MMORPG faithful – with gameplay that scales from casual to hardcore, from a quick five-minute session to a full on gaming marathon.”
In other words, Koster wants the people who grew up on classic MMORPGs, sure, but he also wants the Youths who aren’t even old enough to understand why saying WoW was the first MMO is even funny. And this is a good thing!
Most teenagers make it through their Minecraft and Roblox years only to be deposited in a gaming landscape with few mature sandbox options, most of them aging MMORPGs they’ve never heard of or small-scale toxic survivalboxes with barely any multiplayer in them. There is no great pipeline from something like Terraria to MMORPGs. We don’t have any modern AAA MMORPG sandboxes to welcome them into, period, and they aren’t interested in grinding a post-WoW themepark. And so the bottom has fallen out of our genre. Kids aren’t coming here. Sure, many of our kids play MMOs, including mine, but they’re not the norm. Our genre hasn’t been bolstered by the next generation, nor by its ideas… nor by its money.
So it makes sense to me that Raph Koster is building a game that will appeal both to me, a hardcore virtual worlder who grew up in Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and to my gen alpha children, who live their digital lives in Minecraft. There’s a blue ocean sitting right there.
What I didn’t understand until the fireside chat was that Koster has a good reason to believe that the younger demo is actually reachable for this MMO – that it’s not just a pipedream.
During the Q&A Saturday, he explained that Playable Worlds has insanely detailed survey metrics that show the average age bracket for Stars Reach is likely to be 25 or 26 – in other words, people who weren’t even alive when his first MMORPG launched. And while the current testers of the game are older than that – i.e., more in line with the millennials, gen-x, and boomers who grew up on MMORPGs – that’s because of the way the game has marketed to testers thus far, with traditional print and video rather than TikTok. And now the team is gearing up to expand that marketing reach to the broader demographic it’s wanted all along, which is obviously good news for the game itself if it’s successful.
(Koster did joke that a not-insignificant number of testers have admitted that their children have usurped their Stars Reach test accounts already, which doesn’t surprise me at all.)
But I imagine that hearing all this is disheartening to a lot of people reading here. Even I bristled a little at the idea that the people who’ve been loyal to our genre from the beginning suddenly aren’t wanted anymore, or at least aren’t considered the core or even most desirable audience. Playable Worlds didn’t say that, though, and based on everything we know about the game, it’ll still appeal to us too. It really is softcore Star Wars Galaxies smooshed together with Minecraft, and they really do want both the Olds and the Youths.
And let’s be real, it’s the hardcore “MMORPG faithful” who are now being asked to fund that Kickstarter, not kids.
So when I heard Koster discuss his metrics out loud, I forcibly pushed aside that little flash of jealousy, and what surprised me was what was left in its place: hope.
Our genre needs this. Very few MMORPGs are even trying to attract zoomer gamers and younger, considering them lost already to other genres. But we need the new blood so badly, and maybe Playable Worlds can do it. Maybe this is the game that will finally bridge the generations and manifest the Minecraft-to-MMOs pipeline we need so badly, the conduit between the creative sandbox kids coming up and the creative sandbox kids at heart who are already here, waiting all these years for SWG2. Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t lose the kids to Fortnite (or worse) along the way?
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a generation to pass the MMORPG genre down to, a generation that actually wanted it?
I’ve been thinking about revolutions in MMOs all wrong, all these years. I’d been thinking about revolution in terms of mechanics and tech, but the real revolution has always been in who gets to play. Virtual worlds are at their strongest when they include everyone, no matter who they are, where they live, or even how they prefer to play. Star Wars Galaxies taught me that, when we had snarky lawyers, awkward teens, sweaty gankers, and kindly grandpas all playing together in one guild and one game with little in common but love for the third place. The next wave of MMOs needs to take age-inclusivity seriously, too; it’s the path out of staleness and stagnation. I don’t want the genre to die out with us, or worse, on our watch.
If they do it right, Stars Reach could be the start of the demographic revolution MMORPGs need. In fact, we’d better hope it is.
The MMORPG genre might be “working as intended,” but it can be so much more. Join Massively Overpowered Editor-in-Chief Bree Royce in her Working As Intended column for editorials about and meanderings through MMO design, ancient history, and wishful thinking. Armchair not included.
