Instead, Garriott would like players to take the place of publishers in the development process.

“You become slaves to your publisher as opposed to slaves to the audience and we’re trying to make sure that the task master we are listening to - starting them early and getting them into these alphas and betas – is the player, and not the publisher,” he told us.

In fact, Garriott suggested that, “while the cash will be put to good use by all means”, the Kickstarter project’s primary function is as a “self-selection process”. “By embracing [the core audience] and bringing them into the development process, it lets us suss out a lot of problems”, he said.