Stars Reach, Raph Koster’s grand sci-fi MMORPG sandbox adventure, has officially funded on Kickstarter this afternoon, soaring past $739,000 in crowdfunding with over 5,200 backers – far more than the $200,000 the team at Playable Worlds originally asked for. (The campaign will probably go up a bit more as people wiggle their pledges around in the period after the ending.) [Update: As of 3/27, the numbers look to have settled at 5,329 backers and $753,438.]
As readers know, the studio has been frank about needing more funding to launch, but that wasn’t the purpose of the Kickstarter. Koster previously said the studio needs “a few million in total” on top of past investor funding to finish the game, but the Kickstarter was never meant to carry that weight, just to “demonstrate market interest” to additional investors – as well as provide preorders and paid test access options to willing gamers.
Apparently, that tactic is already working, as Playable Worlds says that even before the Kickstarter concluded today, it’s taken on outside investment from some of its most dedicated testers.
“When we launched our Kickstarter we set out to show game publishers, game distributors and investors just how much you, the gamers, want to see this game come to life. And it worked. In fact, it worked so well that 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. Major investors, who also see this potential, are watching the Kickstarter as we speak to see how many players will invest at this very early stage.”
The Kickstarter included multiple stretch goals to unlock content prior to launch rather than after: the Hansian species, crafting appearance customization, the Hyugon species, guild alliances, the Fae species, the building system upgrade, and the Stokadi species. In fact, the Stokadi species was just unlocked in the last few hours of the campaign as it pushed past $700K.
The Stokadi from the foggy, oligarch-controlled world of Revenia are supposed to be the “shadowy goth” type of character – a bit drow-esque, a bit vampire-ish. But the devs didn’t just want angular purple dudes. “Eventually we hit on the idea of using bat wings as signifiers and trying to use them in various ways to make the head shape more distinctive,” the reveal blog says.
“The idea of using the head to really make the Stokadi distinctive led us to explore much more vampiric head shapes, something that pushed more in the direction of classic movie monsters. The trick here is that stats show that for whatever reason, people tend to prefer to play attractive female characters, even if they don’t mind playing somewhat monstrous male avatars. So we would need to find a way to make the female version work. We still have work to do to pin down the way the Stokadi will look. We have been exploring going with really big bat ears, rather than using bat wings as headgear, but to be honest we aren’t really ready to show some of that art just yet. That’s why they were the last of the stretch goal species to be unlocked!”
Oh, and that 5000-backer goal being reached means we’re getting Princess Leia bun hair.
