Raph Koster on alternative funding and why Playable Worlds is “kick finishing” Stars Reach

Raph Koster has never been one to shy away from an ambitious vision. With his studio, Playable Worlds, the designer behind iconic games like Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies is hard at work on Stars Reach, a sprawling, shardless MMORPG that aspires to be nothing less than a living, breathing world. This week, Playable Worlds is hosting a Kickstarter fundraising event to get this vision to the finish line.

We sat down with Raph to talk about Kickstarter, why the studio’s turning to alternative funding, and what he’s learned about doing it right.

Why did you decide to do a Kickstarter campaign, rather than turning to more traditional fundraising methods?

Raph Koster: Well, as everyone knows, the industry’s going through a pretty tough time right now. There’s layoffs everywhere. Everybody’s watching the news. That also means that investment money is harder to come by. We’ve been backed by investors throughout the five plus years of our existence. In fact, we’ve raised nearly $40 million from investors, which is how we’ve built such a big and ambitious project.

But in recent times, it’s harder to come by. We continue to take investment. In fact, we’re in the middle of finalizing some investment right now, but now is the time where in order to go out there, we really need to demonstrate to those investors that there is market validation that people want this game. And so by going out to Kickstarter and essentially pre-selling access to the game, it’s a way for us to start showing that this is something people want.

That’s really smart. Do you think that that would work for a smaller studio too?

I think the classic big mistake that people make with video game Kickstarters is that they use it to start projects. And what we’re doing is really more – people keep saying it’s more like a “kick finisher,” right?

So we all know in video game development, schedules are hard. Finding the funds is hard. It can be difficult to land on time, predict your budget accurately and so on. When people set up Kickstarters for development projects that are just getting started, that can be a pretty high risk. And we’ve seen a lot of them not be successful at delivering because of that.

I think this can work for a smaller studio, but I would urge everybody to get most of the game done so that they have much more predictability around what it is that they’re promising and delivering. In our case, what we’re going to do is say, “If you back this Kickstarter, you get in to play the game now,” right, because it is already playable, it’s already in live testing, and we’ll let people in immediately? So I think it’s viable, but you have to have the right promise to the customer.

I was wondering about that – what do donors get, exactly? Access to everything in the game?

Yeah, that’s right. We are currently doing that via tester signups, and there’s been a queue. We’ve actually had tens of thousands of people in line to get into the test already. So the core of the Kickstarter offerings is that if you back us, you will be able to play, starting immediately, all the way through the testing phase, which means the servers won’t be up all the time, but you’ll have daily contact with the dev team, you’ll be able to give your input as features are developed, just participate because we’re in there all the time talking with our testers. Play through that entire period and also get to play during early access.

So we’re going ahead and giving people to the early access period once that opens. And the higher up you go in the packages, it’ll include more than that, of course. There’ll be game time once the game launches, and of course there’s all kinds of fun skins and perks and whatnot that are in the various tiers as well.

Have you ever done this kind of Kickstarter before or is this a first for everyone?

This is a first for me. We do have folks on the team who’ve done Kickstarters before, but I was an advisor to companies that did Kickstarters, but I’ve never done one myself. So lots of learning.

Any learning that you can pass along? I think everyone out there is wondering, “How can I do this? How do you make a game in 2025? How do you fund a game in 2025?”

Build up your community in advance I think is a key learning. You want to make sure that before you even start this process, you already have a sizable community that you can speak to. You can’t build one on the fly during the Kickstarter. You have to come to the Kickstarter with one already built, and then you can grow it, right? And typically they do grow during the Kickstarter.

So you want to be piling up followers in advance is the key thing. Get them signed up to be notified by the Kickstarter. Planning out your tiers is super important, figuring out what kinds of things you can offer. In our genre, the MMO players are very, very unhappy about pay-to-win kinds of approaches, so it’s very important to try to plan rewards that are focused on cosmetics or don’t provide a real significant advantage to the player in a way that makes the game unfair. So that’s a really important thing for MMOs in particular.

And I think probably for any competitive game, you don’t want to be selling advantage.

Other than that, you’ve got to be in touch with the community, with your testers, with your players throughout the process. We shared our high-level plans for tiers and rewards with our testers, then went back and adjusted what we were planning based on the feedback they gave us. We’ll be rolling the details to them this weekend in advance, and we’ll be making last-minute edits again based on what they say, because ultimately you’re making this for them. It’s an offering for them, and you want them to be excited about it, and you want it to be something that they’ll want, right? You’re asking them to come along on the journey, so they should have significant input.

Check out the Stars Reach Kickstarter campaign to learn more about the game and get a sneak peek at the action.