Stars Reach is the Raph Koster moonshot that, as far as I can tell, has immediately shot itself in the head. The official Kickstarter will be active at the time of this post, but some of the pertinent details have become clear in a fireside chat with Koster (emphasis added):

[…] The game itself, however, will be free-to-play at its full post-early-access launch, with an optional sub (called a “property pass”), supporter packs, a cash shop, all for cosmetics, not P2W items. “We’re not gonna break the economy for the sake of the Kickstarter,” Raph Koster says.

The devs don’t want players thinking of the property pass as a subscription – “We’re avoiding saying the word,” Koster admits – but it pretty much is; that pass will be required to own homesteads and to receive early access to new cosmetics. If you let the pass lapse, your house will just pack up and be ready for you to place again when you resume (Stars Wars Galaxies, basically). […]

Let’s review for a second. Stars Reach is a game about exploration, gathering resources, fighting mobs, all with an entirely player-based economy. It is being billed on the official website as a “massively multiplayer sandbox RPG” meant to “immersing yourself into an alternative world of adventure.” And it will be Free-to-Play!

…unless perhaps you want live anywhere you will be playing. That will cost you a $10/month subscription.

But it potentially get worse! I was taking it as a given that players would have some base-level ability to set up crafting stations inside a spaceship or whatever, even if you weren’t paying space-rent. You know, like in Starbound or No Man’s Sky. But according to the preview on homesteading:

A Homestead is a patch of a world that you claim as your own. You set up a camp, register that camp with the Transplanetary League, and voila!, it is yours.

Now you can build on that plot of land. You can create a home, a shop, a manufacturing facility, a farm, a giant robot…whatever you desire. If you claim a homestead in space, you can build a starport, or hollow out the interior of an asteroid as a smuggler’s base, and more.

Combine that with this other Reddit AMA thread:

Proximity will matter a lot.

1. You have limited inventory. Ships also have limited inventory. If you want to transport a lot, you will be dragging it behind you in wagons or containers.

That means you will have to physically (and relatively slowly) move goods from the wilderness to your spaceport, from orbit to a wormhole to another space zone, across that other space zone, across however many astroid fields, nebulae, etc, as there may be, until you get to orbit around the destination planet, land, then schlep the stuff to its delivery location. And monsters are probably going to be trying to steal it the whole way.

Neither of which indicates to me that the space hobo way of life is especially supported. By which I mean any F2P player. Because what are you going to be able to do on a foundational level? All items decay and have to be replaced with player-produced ones. Lugging around resources is apparently going to be painful. I’m taking it as a given that players will be able to craft basic items without needing a homestead, but who even fucking knows at this point? There’s a flowchart on the “Stars Reach Tour” that I have helpfully annotated with the latest information regarding the property pass:

It truly boggles the mind. Or would, if these “industry veterans” were not a font of dumbass ideas.

I have less than zero interest in Stars Reach at this point. It was already conceptually hostile to solo players, but I still had it in the back of my mind as a sort of “challenge” to engage with down the road. But paywalling the one aspect of the game that is remotely sticky enough to get players to stay? No thank you. It’s almost as bad as the devs from Forever Winter with their real-time water mechanic.