
As soon as I saw the news that Stars Reach was going to be launching a Kickstarter, I immediately stood up, got dressed, and drove down to the nearest beach. It’s January, so it was cold, but it’s New England, so that’s pretty normal. I just stared over a seemingly endless field of slate-grey water beneath a mouldering sky for half an hour before loudly saying, “Man.” A seagull squawked. It felt appropriate.
Whether or not any part of that story is objectively true isn’t the point; it’s emotionally true. Because yeah, it is a big deal. It’s also not a big deal, and the thing is that a lot of the things that have people saying this is a big deal don’t overlap with the ways in which it actually is a big deal. But some do. So let’s just talk about all of this and try to look at this objectively, which probably isn’t going to help much, but we try it.
First and foremost, I think it’s important to state something up front that should be so obvious it doesn’t require any statement whatsoever… but it apparently does. Raph Koster never said “we are not going to do a Kickstarter.” What he said was that at the time he revealed the game, he had no plans to do a Kickstarter. Those plans have subsequently changed, and if the core reason for your opprobrium is that you believe a promise was broken, it is worth checking that you may, in fact, be mad at someone who is not breaking a promise that was never made.
Now, it is fair to be disappointed that plans have changed, but I honestly would reckon that no one is more disappointed about that change than Raph Koster himself, so that feels a bit excessive. But I do think that there’s a big difference here from the vast majority of MMO Kickstarters, and I think it is well worth considering. Whatever the Kickstarter target is (I have no advance knowledge of it) and whatever the rewards may be, it is not funding an investor demo.
A while back I wrote a piece about how crowdfunding should not be how you fund your investor demo because we had seen this happen more than a few times: People who did not know what they were getting into ran a successful Kickstarter to fund that demo, and what they made either didn’t attract investors or attracted investors who wanted changes that the people running the project did not wish to make. Basically, it was a quick way to get from “give us a million dollars to make an investor demo” to “can we make an MMORPG for a million dollars?”
The answer to that question is no, by the way.
By Koster’s own statements, Stars Reach, which has been built thus far with investor funding already, is not using Kickstarter to fund its investor demo. This is more of a case where the game is already well underway but investors want to see more signs of interest before coughing up more cash. Considering all of the mess that’s going down with the industry right now, I can’t say that’s a stunning or bizarre request. The industry’s economic backdrop casts funding situations in a different light, and it also casts the studio’s motivations in a different light, especially since the goal is not convincing theoretical investors that may exist but actual ones that are seemingly already on board with conditions.
This changes the calculus and is, I think, an important distinction. But it doesn’t change the fact that this is still not actually a finished game that is ready to launch. Indeed, the whole reason for going this route is that the game is not yet ready for early access at this time, and so this seemed like the wiser decision. It’s a decision I don’t even really disagree with, even beyond the fact that I don’t know what the behind-the-scenes tech looks like at all.
So if Koster and his team aren’t actually breaking any sort of promise by moving to a crowdfunding campaign, why does this seem like such a big deal?
It’s not because investors are being a bit gun-shy when it comes to backing this project further; a big expensive project that keeps costing money is something that you should, logically, be a bit cautious about. That makes sense. And it’s not even because crowdfunded projects have collapsed a lot because… well, that happens a lot everywhere. It’s the nature of game development. Lots of games don’t work out or just don’t turn out very good in the end. MMOs are uniquely bad projects for crowdfunding, but a lot of the reasons that so many crowdfunded MMOs have either collapsed or turned into ongoing grift cycles are cultural rather than conceptual.
No, it’s a big deal because the optics are awful. And I don’t say that to dig on someone who obviously knows the optics are awful and knew it before even announcing it; I say it because it is a statement of fact. The environment that was willing to buy into Kickstarters led by big-name MMO developers died a brutal death long before 2025, and now that same concept is being met with open hostility even by people who love the studio and the genre and want the game made!
There’s a good reason for it, too; we’ve had a decade of living with Kickstarted games that don’t fully exist like Star Citizen, Camelot Unchained, and Ashes of Creation. With rare exceptions like Elite Dangerous, most of the crowdfunded MMOs that do launch fizzle like Shroud of the Avatar or Crowfall. For someone who enjoys MMORPGs, at this point the best case scenario looks like having a small and faithful audience throwing money into complete pipe dreams that are never going to approach any sort of launch.
Do I think that’s the same camp that Stars Reach falls into? I really hope not, and I don’t think that’s the goal of anyone who is working on the game, but that is the association people are going to make and… well, it sucks. You know it, and I know it. I would bet dollars to donuts that Raph Koster knows it. No one wants to sign up for a cycle in which your game is going to be grouped in with people who are one communal lifestyle away from being in an actual cult.
Am I saying that I am or am not going to be backing the project? No. I am not in a place where I can really back anything whether I want to or not, and my jury on whether or not Stars Reach is for me personally is extremely out. Like, the jury does not convene until we have a playable game. But I still want it to exist, and I want it to be a good game that legitimately gets to explore the ideas that are swirling around here.
And if it doesn’t produce a good game, I want that to be because of its own missteps, not because it had to go to crowdfunding. But that association is going to be there, and it sucks, and it’s not the game’s fault, but we can’t pretend it doesn’t happen just the same. If anything, I just hope for people giving the game the grace it deserves for trying to navigate a challenging environment.
Now, if Koster starts greeting the “glorious Stars Reach community,” I reserve the right to change my mind on that.
