The developers of Astronaut briefly attempted to launch another game on Kickstarter. The game was going to be called ‘The Mission’, but the Kickstarter has been cancelled and an explaination has yet to emerge. However, some of us may be exhaling a sigh of relief.
Astronaut was funded back in 2011 and was meant to be the official NASA MMO. You now know it as Starlite, an incredibly glitchy mess with a mostly negative rating on Steam. Playing it leaves you with a distinct concern about the fact that NASA sends people to space. In short, the 20 minutes worth of game that they previously released was certainly not worth the $46K raised for it after it finally crawled on to Kickstarter in 2014.
Only 3 backers
That is not a good foundation to be trying to launch another Kickstarter off of. It seems the Star Ranger team realized this when ‘The Mission‘ only got 3 backers in its first week. They will more than likely attempt to relaunch the Kickstarter as they did for Astronaut. It took 3 tries to successfully fund Astronaut after all, and with what we have experienced of that, it will probably take more to fund The Mission. They did leave a ‘coming soon’ picture on the Kickstarter page, but is that something to look forward too?
Personally, as a big physics and space nerd, I love the concept of an educational space adventure. However, I have absolutely no faith in this developer any more and I think there are some alternatives that are a lot less lazy. I recommend Universe Sandbox if you want your fix of space physics and education. I’d be interested to know if anyone does plan on backing ‘The Mission’ if it comes back to Kickstarter and why. However, I can guarentee that I won’t be one of those zealous backers.
