FUNDING STARSHIP SIMULATOR

OUR FUNDING MODEL

Having worked informally on various non-profit projects in the past, we felt the time was right to form a brand new studio (Fleetyard Studios Ltd) with the sole purpose of building and releasing our first commercial title – Starship Simulator. Being a new studio however, we’re unknown to the industry and don’t have a wealth of titles under our belt, or an established community of gamers to draw upon for support and inspiration.

As such, we’ve decided that our first objective as a new studio is to build ourselves a great community, and the best way to do that is to create an engaging experience with absolutely no barriers to entry. A game really is nothing without its community, so that’s why the base sandbox version of Starship Simulator is going to be released completely for free. That includes the fully simulated ship, the full 1:1 scale galaxy, multiplayer, and all procedural content.

Going “Free to Play” tends to raise alarm bells for most experienced gamers, because generally that means the game will be filled with micro-transactions, loot boxes, or other morally questionable tactics to extract money from players, but in our case “Free” really does mean free. No strings attached.

Building an entire game does take a lot of time and money though, so in practical terms how can we do this for free? Well, that’s where we need your help. Starship Simulator is very much a community funded project, and it’s only thanks to the help and support from our backers that we’re able to work on this full time.

Our Kickstarter campaign went amazingly well! We received £362k of the £402k campaign, and it will go towards hiring new staff to get the game out to everyone. Thank you to every single one of the 5,761 backers who helped get us to this point. ( If you missed it, you can still get the same rewards over on our Ko-Fi shop)

To help with monthly running costs we will occasionally release new ships for the game. These will be smaller vessels that are designed for solo play, or multiplayer crews of 2 to 5 people. The cost of these ships will depend on the amount of work involved in creating them, but for a ballpark figure we’re thinking about £5-£10.

Finally, we will be releasing full story-driven single player campaigns as future DLC content that will have a box price associated with them. These are going to have high production costs, so releasing them for free just won’t be possible. Hopefully by that point we’ll have a large team of developers that all need paying!