Not February 10th, and not this week, but next week: Stars Reach has a new-new Kickstarter launch date. It’s rolling out on February 25th.
The Raph Koster-founded Playable Worlds MMORPG was first given a global reveal and a name last summer and has been in pre-alpha testing ever since, ramping up last fall and through the holidays. The Kickstarter wasn’t originally part of the game’s funding plan, but the studio admitted back in January that it needed a Kickstarter to prove to skittish industry investors that the game has an audience. It was meant to roll out last week but was delayed specifically to rope in more testers.
As we noted on MOP’s most recent podcast, that was probably a good plan, as the game already shows and plays much better in February than it did in January. Indeed, development has been surprisingly quick since the reveal, and the cadence is ambitious: PW plans to hit alpha this summer, beta by the end of 2025, and launch in 2026.
We don’t know how much the team is hoping to raise with this Kickstarter, though Playable Worlds has already revealed its Kickstarter tiers, the top version of which includes the launch party, a planet in your honor, and a meet-up with Raph Koster. The studio has intimated that it needs “a few million” dollars to finish out the game but that the Kickstarter doesn’t have to carry all of it.
You can actually still get into the rolling tests through Stars Reach’s ongoing promotion: Follow the Kickstarter, screenshot it, post it to social media, screenshot that, and send the screenshots into the devs (through Discord, we imagine).
