I Bought Into The Star's Reach Kickstarter

Well, I finally did it. Despite covering the financial situation of Cloud Imperium Games I went ahead and backed a game on Kickstarter. Star's Reach, a game under development by Playable Worlds, finishes up its Kickstarter campaign tomorrow and I jumped onboard last night.

I decided to buy the $30 package, the cheapest I could get while still having the ability to play the development build. That puts me up to the cap on my alpha game budget of $50 (I paid $19.99 for EVE Frontier) so don't ask me to pay for another game. I have too many to play and write about now.

In many ways, the negative coverage Frontier receives led me to check out the Star's Reach Kickstarter. People are losing their ever-loving minds over CCP Games' selling cosmetics packages for $100 (off 30% for a limited time!) and I decided to check out the offerings from Playable Worlds. 

Look, I understand. I really do. Companies need money. But I'm not paying $20 for a SKIN and a pretty portrait for a game still in alpha much less $100. Not even after looking at the prices for Star's Reach Kickstarter packages as a comparison.

Selected packages below $250

Two things stood out to me. The first is pets. I started getting flashbacks to Black Desert Online when Kakao published the game in North America. The pets from the cash shop were so overpowered in looting, making them almost mandatory purchases. Pearl Abyss did tone down the cash shop greed when they began self-publishing BDO world-wide, but the damage was already done to my memories.

The expensive packages

The second was how much people were willing to spend. With about 24 hours to go before the campaign closed here is how many of the most expensive packages were sold.

• Wormgate Trader ($1500) - 4
• Nebula Surfer ($2000) - 25
• Tech Runner ($2250) - 4
• Guild Patron ($5000) - 6
• Galactic Plenipotentiary ($10,000) - 5

Those 44 people combined for $145,000 towards Playable Worlds' goal of $200,000 for the Kickstarter campaign. Overall, those 1% of Kickstarter backers contributed 22% of total funding. Including those who purchased the $995 and $1050 packages, 2% of backers contributed nearly $193,000 or 29% of the funding. A real life example of how whales can fund a game. Hopefully the 99 people who purchased the $800 package aren't offended by not being called whales. Include them and the percentages go up to 4% of backers paid in 41% of the Kickstarter total.

And, I'm one of the people who has contributed to a Kickstarter MMORPG now. My only previous experience was with Andrew Groen's Empires of EVE books. Hopefully my experience with Star's Reach will prove equally satisfying.