I suspect the campaign will be past the half million dollar mark well before Conan O’Brien delivers his last joke at the Oscars on Sunday night, and it is good to see the campaign succeeding.  Success is always better than the alternative.

That said, the baggage of more than a decade watching and participating in MMO Kickstarters has left me with a skeptical eye, so bear that in mind if I seem to be finding fault with winning.

For example, I do remain somewhat unexcited by the decision to roll out with such a low number at the start of the campaign.  It feels like the team really wasn’t confident in what they would get when they went with $200K, and blowing through a low number in under an hour doesn’t feel like the big win some people are making it.

I suppose it doesn’t matter in the long run.  This isn’t a tech IPO where the opening price was $20 and ended the day at $200, so that the company lost out on a huge amount of cash by not pricing higher.  Playable Worlds gets all the money, whether it is $200K or $20 million, in the end.  That they went with a very safe initial goal… well, maybe the potential investors won’t even notice.  They are who the team is said to be trying to impress.

But the lack of foresight or confidence or whatever does have some impact, the first being any sense of urgency.  Right?  The goal was reached!  Op success!  We’re done, everybody can go home!

I realize that isn’t true, at least for the Playable Worlds team, who will be working hard for the entire length of the campaign.  But the optics are now that the campaign was a success with 29 days left on the clock.

There was also some impact from the low level of confidence when it came to Early Bird tiers.  The Early Bird Ranger tier for example, where I landed, offered just 100 slots which were snapped up pretty quickly, leading to people in APAC complaining that there were none left for them when morning came to their region.

Raph initially said over on Discord (where the complaints were getting heated) that Kickstarter wouldn’t let them modify the tiers once the campaign was live, but then somebody checked on that and found out that was incorrect and they added some more Early Bird slots later in the day.  They also added at least one new tier since then, because Kickstarter will totally let you do that.  They just don’t want you messing with anybody’s pledge, so you can’t, for example, double the price of a tier with an eye towards making people who pledged at the initial pricing pay more.

The early meeting of the initial goal also meant that they had to get immediately into stretch goals, which is another aspect of Kickstarter about which I have ambivalent feelings.

Stretch goals often feel like something they were going to do anyway, or at least feel detached from the amount required to get there.  As the campaign is headed for $500K we’re closing in on the third stretch goal.

Stars Reach Stretch Goals

So we got one new species for an additional $150K, but then a second additional species is just a later $50K lift?  How much does it cost to add a species?  And were they just not going to do crafting appearance customization if the campaign petered out before $450K?  Maybe?  I don’t know.  But it doesn’t feel like an obvious, “Yes, these things were absolutely tied to the team reaching this level of funding.”

There is also the question of how many stretch goals are they going to roll out… which brings me back to how many of them were they going to do anyway.

I am more curious as to how many people pledge, or raise their pledge, based on stretch goals.  I have never seen any data around that, so I suppose it could be a lot of people.  There could be people out there right now saying, “Golly, I’d better go up to a Traveler Tier pledge or we won’t be getting those Hyugons!”

But that has never been me.  I have only changed my pledge tier once in a campaign, and that was for Camelot Unchained when reaching the two million dollar goal seemed in doubt.  In hindsight, that goal was the opposite of the Stars Reach goal, an over estimation of self worth by Mark Jacobs, something reflected in his every move since then.

That just happens to be the only pledge I ended up getting refunded… at least partially… back before Mark Jacobs decided to stonewall and stop speaking to the press.  But I mentioned my baggage further up the post, and you can certainly find my skepticism as to whether I, as an individual, should feel personally responsible for helping some company meets its goals or if I really have any impact on anything, mixed into that.  (The latter also strongly influenced by the current political situation in the US, but that is for another post some day.)

Also in the mix were some questions about the Head Start add-on offering.

The Stars Reach ala carte menu for people who have pledged

For $20 you can get into the game ahead of everybody else once they do the final player wipe at the end of early access.

(Note: Early access isn’t early access in then sense you are likely used to over at Steam, where it generally means early launch. Instead it is the last testing cycle because it will conclude with a complete player wipe, so anything you do during that time will be deleted.  Be warned.)

Anyway, there we accusations of pay to win and the whole thing got a post on the Kickstarter page where the team declared it was absolutely not pay to win by falling back on the idea that there will be so many planets that nobody will be able to get out there and grab them all or anything.  True enough.

But in a game where there is no instanced housing, where the three rules of real estate (location, location, and location) apply, this seems like saying that housing prices in Silicon Valley don’t matter because look at all the cheap housing there is in Redding, a mere five hour drive away.

In the long term this head start thing will not be an issue, but when people get let in after the head start has expired and find the first half dozen nice planets they can reach have been claimed and have a homer owners association setup that won’t allow them access, there will undoubtedly be some salt over on Reddit and on the official Discord about the fairness of the thing.  It is, without a doubt, selling some level of advantage as well as farming FOMO.  I won’t be giving into it, but some will.

Finally, I have been watching with some interest how many people opt in for pledge one of the seven tiers that offer a lifetime property pass, the lowest priced of which is the Forever Traveler tier.

The Forever Traveler Tier

$450 is a steep ask, but as I write this 183 people have pledged at that level and I would bet that it is largely based on the lifetime property pass.  (The second most popular choice with the pass was the Early Bird Transplanetary Tier which ran $800.  All 100 of those were sold.)

And, honestly, if I were fully committed to the game, if I knew that I would be in for this and willing to commit the way I have done in EVE Online, where I have been playing since 2006 and have been continuously subscribed and engaged since 2011, I would just bite the bullet and pledge the $450 to never worry about the whole 30 day property pass thing ever again.  I could afford that.  It would cause no hardship in my life.

But I am not there yet.  The gap between what we have been shown so far… the pre-alpha “not quite a co-op survival” game… and the vision being spun by the pillars and Raph’s enthusiasm is too great.  I haven’t seen a spaceship yet.  There isn’t an in-game currency to be seen.  The base level functionality needed to support the vision isn’t there yet.  Everything is rough and awkward and we are many months away from anything polished.

Once again, the baggage of the past is weighing on my ability to trust in the future.  This time I’ll lay some blame on faked up EverQuest Next demos.  Don’t trust what you cannot touch.

There is still time though.  The campaign has a good three weeks left to run.  They could show us a bit more.

But it seems unlikely.  They are more focused on getting people who have followed the Kickstarter and who might pledge into the play tests featuring the current state of the pre-alpha to show them that there is something there worth backing and hoping that the vision will be enough to sustain them.

So lots of play tests being scheduled, but very little likelihood of anything new.  The team is too busy supporting the campaign and the risk of introducing a new variable that might breaking something is too great.

Still, in the end, the campaign has funded.  Op success.  Now to play out the next three weeks… about which I will have some opinions in a later post.

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