Playable Worlds

Playable Worlds is a game developer studio co-founded by Raph Koster and Eric Goldberg. They are currently working on their first game, Stars Reach, which is going to be a social, sandbox MMORPG with a living world and a fully player-driven economy. Raph, known for his previous games, Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies as well as Metaplace, is trying to fulfill his livelong ambitions of creating a truly alive online world, now that technology seems finally capable of doing so.

The Team

as of July, 2024, according to the Playable Worlds website.

• Raph Koster, CEO
• Eric Goldberg, President
• Aaron Hamilton, Senior Environment Artist
• Arthur Littlefield, Client Engineer
• Brandon Hooks, Technical Animator
• Brian Youn, Lead Concept Artist
• Damon Osgood, Technical Architect
• David Georgeson, Game Director
• John Brown, Principal Animator
• Johnny Ow, Principal VFX Artist
• Justin Strefling, HR Manager
• Kurt Larson, Lead Sound Effects Designer
• Light Bates, Technical Designer
• Magnus Hollmo, Art Director
• Majick Robinson, Finance/Remote Office Manager
• Meghann Bledsoe, Designer/World Builder
• Nataly Moreno, Senior Tools Engineer
• Nick Hand, Senior Character Artist
• Niina Fujioka, Director of Business Operations
• Rick Reynolds, Marketing Director
• Rodney Haza, Producer
• Samuel Corbin, Lead Gameplay Engineer
• Sean Weeden, Graphic Designer
• Yvette Han, UI/UX Designer

Company Announcement

The company was founded in secrecy in 2018. They went out of hiding and announced their existence on October 3, 2019, when they received $2.7M in seed funding and started hiring and growing their team.

At the moment of announcement, the team also included:

• Raph Koster (CEO & co-founder)
• Eric Goldberg (head of business, strategy, and corporate development & co-founder)
• Dorian Ouer (CTO)
• Mat Broome (Studio Art Director)
• Brian Crowder (Lead Server Enginer)
• Greg Costikyan (Lead Game Designer)
• Stacey McMahon (Director of HR and Business Operations)
• Michael Seare (Lead Client Engineer)
• Patrick Ferland, (Lead Gameplay Engineer)

And the company was looking to hire:

• Tools Engineer
• Gameplay Engineer
• Technical Animator

Interestingly, several of these Job posting mention "Experience with behavior-driven artificial intelligence and cellular automata-based world simulations" as a desired qualification. the last job offer mentions experience with "Unreal, Unity, or similar high-performance game engines".

Additional Funding Rounds

Playable Worlds received several rounds of venture capital:

October 3, 2019 - at the unveiling of the company - they announced a $2.7m seed round.

On June 11, 2020, Playable Worlds announced receiving $10m in Series A funding.

On April 20, 2022, they announcet a $25m Series B.

Later hires with special mention on the website

• Light Bates (Prototyper)
• Abby Suarez (Senior Gameplay Engineer)
• Gordon Walton (Executive Producer & Chief Product Officer)
• David Georgeson (Game Director)

Location

Playable Worlds originally had an office located in San Marcos, Califiornia - but ever since the pandemic they are working remotely, with yearly company-meetups in person.

Rumors

The seed investment round was lead by "BITKRAFT esports ventures", who were also investing in Crypto projects at that time. This led to some people mistakenly believing that the game Playable Worlds was working on might have something to do with esports and/or crypto. This has been publicly denied by PW team members multiple times. There will be neither esports nor crypto in the game.