“We want to keep Star Stable Online relevant for the next 10 years” — Interviews with Game Director Stacy Place and CEO Johan Sjöberg

Star Stable Online is a horse-focused MMORPG that’s been defying expectations and proving the validity of its unconventional target audience – meaning teenage girl online PC gamers – since 2011. For its 10th Anniversary and the surrounding celebration, the SSO team reached out to The Mane Quest for a chat about what’s been happening at Star Stable and where the game is headed. 

It’s been over two years since I talked to former Product Owner Nika Bender about the making of SSO – I’m thrilled to give you all some delicious new insights. This time, I had two absolutely wonderful calls with two of the core people behind developing and managing Star Stable Online: Game Director Stacy Place and CEO Johan Sjöberg.

An (Un)usual Career

Star Stable’s new Game Director, Stacy Place

In Early September 2021, I am sitting down for a video call – albeit a one-sided one, because my webcam decides this is the day to randomly strike – with Stacy Place, Co-Game Director of Star Stable Online. 

Stacy has been with Star Stable Entertainment for six years now. Originally from the US, Stacy initially studied film and TV production, then worked in game journalism before starting to work on video creation for Star Stable Online. She eventually moved to Sweden and became the Head of Community Moderation, then the Product Owner of the Horse Team in SSO, and finally took on the mantle of Game Director in Spring 2021. 

From Film to Community to Game Direction – not quite a career path many people would expect, I remark. “Our previous Game Director actually has a similar story,” Stacy tells me. “I always tell this to students: in the games industry, there is no one clear path to any specific position.” 
Producing a Live TV show and producing a Live Game are actually not that different, she adds. 

Stacy always loved horses, but actual riding lessons were out of budget in her childhood. The love for horse games came with her work at Star Stable. These days she plays Horse Reality and Rival Stars Horse Racing for their breeding mechanics, and is excited for Wildshade for the same reason. 

I ask Stacy what’s changed in the six years that she’s been with Star Stable Entertainment. 
“The company has grown so much,” she explains. “When I joined, we were about 50 people, now it’s over 200.” 
It’s not only a change in quantity though. “We’ve really evolved, and are moving in a positive direction I believe,” Stacy says. “We’re working on how we set priorities and assign resources appropriately.” 
That hasn’t always been the case, she admits. When Star Stable started out, some of the vibe was more “hoping that people like this kind of game”. The approach is more professional now, the goal is to ensure SSO is the best it can be. 
“In light of our tenth anniversary, our objective is to make sure Star Stable Online stays relevant for the next ten years,” Stacy tells me. As Game Director, she can now push for lasting changes and long-term improvements.

Old Tech, New Problems

One big aspect of this long-term investment is modernizing the technology on which Star Stable Online is built. The game is a ten year old piece of software built in a proprietary game engine, and much of the internal tools are inefficient or difficult to work with for SSO’s developers and designers. 

“This has been a big source of frustration,” Stacy acknowledges. “And addressing it may have been seen as a low priority for too long. It’s exciting to see things move forward in this area. I’ve seen a big improvement in the past year.”

The new aim for longevity lets the team finally address these fundamental issues with the attention they deserve. 
To attentive community members, this topic may sound familiar: In Spring 2021, various SSO communities found and discussed a handful of Glassdoor reviews of Star Stable Entertainment. Glassdoor is a website where employees can learn about workplaces and fair salaries, where people can leave anonymous reviews of their employers. On the SSE Glassdoor page, several reviews from the past few years praise the people working there, but criticize management decisions and technical limitations. 

“Yes, we’re aware of those reviews,” Stacy says when I bring them up. “There is definitely truth in some of these complaints.” 

The discussion led to some confusion among players too however: some people misunderstood the term ‘tech debt’ – an expression from software development to describe a situation where past shortcuts or outdated methods are causing issues with current development – and conflated this with financial debt to draw false conclusions about SSE’s situation.  

“Overall, players discussing these matters is a positive thing for us though,” she says. “If working conditions and technical deficiencies are being discussed by the community, that can help people bring it up and push for change internally. It can lend the arguments additional weight.”  

Stacy emphasizes that many people at Star Stable Entertainment pay close attention to what the community says and does. “Many people on the team care a lot and genuinely want to improve things,” she tells me. “And we read every email we get from players. Even though sometimes people will get pre-written answers, it’s all forwarded to the relevant teams.”

Development Priorities: Quests and Horses

While on the topic of community discourse, I bring up another common talking point in Star Stable groups: that many long-term players long for more quests to be added. A reasonable request? 

“Players want things to do, and the story has to be continued,” Stacy agrees. “There’s definitely a hunger for more endgame content, and we want to deliver that.” Stacy explains that there has not really been a dedicated “Quest Team” at SSO recently, and that as a result, the people who could have been working on that, would keep having other tasks assigned to them. 

“It’s always about juggling resources,” Stacy goes on, “between new horses, events and updating environments and character designs, it’s been difficult to get resources allocated for the creation of new quests.” But here too, the future is looking promising: “I actually have a meeting on that later today!” Stacy adds. “We need to move this forward in a healthy way.”
That does not mean we should expect fewer new horse releases in the future though. “Horses are our main business. They are what keeps the game afloat – and we take them seriously!” Most recently, Star Stable has added the updated American Paint Horse and additional coat variations for six popular breeds.

UPDATE, 19.11.2021

An addendum, because this part of the article appears to be misunderstood by many readers: That there hasn't been a dedicated quest team does not mean that nobody at SSO has been working on Quests in recent months and years. “When we say we don’t have a ‘dedicated quest team’, we mean that we haven’t always been structured to have a team that specifically works only on quests,” Stacy clarifies in a follow-up email to this article. “Instead, we have multiple teams that work on delivering the game. So the team working on quests doesn’t only work on quests, which are complex and touch many other areas of development.”

“For example, the team I led previously works on horses and characters, while the team that creates quests also includes other types of game content such as races, festivals, and area revamps. Quests are a big part of what they do, just not all of it!”

“Quests are a very important part of what Star Stable is and what it will continue to be. But that said, we agree that the setup I just described has presented challenges in delivering the way we want to. So that's why changes are already being made - so we can deliver more of what players are asking for, but with dedicated focus and support.”

I had to get that fleabitten Arab in the game after recently starting to ride a fleabitten Arab in real life and it makes me happy.

Rebuilding Foundations

Apart from quests and updating the tech underneath, the Star Stable team is currently working towards various systemic updates. Characters and environments are still being updated – the Dark Riders are going to get a new look very soon – and a new animation system has already been built into the game, although its potential will not be visible to players right away. 
“We’re also working on an anti-cheat solution,” Stacy explains, which will no doubt be a relief to more competitive players. “Due to our target audience, we have to exclusively work with software that is fully COPPA and GDPR compliant, which has slowed this down a bit.”

Short term update plans are communicated by Star Stable in the shape of weekly roadmaps.

The Star Stable team is dedicated to fortifying the foundations on which their game is built: as another example, Stacy tells me about a new framework for holiday events. “So far, there hasn’t really been a strict rule for what ‘makes’ a festival in Star Stable,” she explains. In the future, with a bit more structure to the design of holiday specials, the team should have an easier time planning and handling these events. Will these changes be noticeable for players? 

“Not right away,” Stacy says. “We’re currently working on a three year plan for festivals. We’re creating a basis now that the team can then keep building on.” 
This is what it means to “repay” the tech debt after all: Improving and strengthening all the underlying systems and structures, from the design, code and art perspectives alike. 

“We do all this with consideration for the wellbeing of our employees,” Stacy adds. “We don’t crunch, have plenty of vacation and sick time, and we’d rather delay a release than compromise our employees’ wellbeing.” 
Treating your workers like human beings may sound self-evident to some, but as we know from scandal after scandal in the video game industry, the opposite is disturbingly common. 

“I feel very fortunate at Star Stable in that regard,” says Stacy. “If our working conditions mean that sometimes a feature takes a bit longer to get done and released, that’s worth it in the end.”

Star Stable’s current character generator for new players.

Another of these long-awaited and work-intensive changes is the player character update. “The new character creation will offer a lot more varied options to express yourself,” Stacy tells me. “That’s also still a while away though.”
What will not change is SSO’s limitation to a female player character, even with the new character creation. 

“It’s a game about sisterhood,” Stacy emphasizes. Although she loves that people of other genders can find enjoyment in the game, the SSO team will keep its focus on girls. Stacy is aware that some people will be disappointed by this, but remarks that they will never be able to please everyone. 
“There should just be more horse games in general,” she says, stressing that while Star Stable focuses on female players, she does not believe that the whole genre should limit itself in that way. 

While I always and strongly agree with any call for ‘more horse games’, I cannot help but be a little disappointed in SSO’s stance here myself, when there would be so much room for a powerful statement on inclusivity by doing away with such gendered limitations. On the other hand I still can’t really fault this unabashedly girly MMO game for sticking to its uniquely feminine focus in this industry where girls – be it as characters or as players – are still too often an afterthought at best.

Star Stable Origins

Johan Sjöberg has been CEO of Star Stable since 2017 – but his history with the game goes back much further.

A few weeks after my chat with Stacy – and with the month-long birthday party already coming to an end – I sit down for another video call: this time with none other than Johan Sjöberg, Star Stable’s CEO. 

Johan is part of the old guard at Star Stable Entertainment: He co-founded Pixel Tales in 2004, the company who would go on to develop the Starshine Legacy titles and eventually kick off Star Stable Online. Johan worked as a writer and producer on all of the original offline Star Stable games, then was a part of SSE’s board of directors until he took up the position of CEO in 2017. 

“I’m a pretty private person,” Johan admits as he receives my call in his home, while his kids are still at school and soccer practice. Most of the time, he is perfectly happy to leave the communication around Star Stable to the company’s dedicated communication people, he tells me. I’m honored that he takes the time for The Mane Quest, I remark with a grin. 

Since I have this rare opportunity to get Star Stable’s history straight from the source, I ask Johan where it all began: Star Stable enthusiasts may recall that the MMORPG evolved out of a series of single player PC games, but how did those come to be? 

“The idea for the Starshine Legacy games resulted from a collaboration with a Norwegian book club subscription. The book club had issues retaining their users, so Pixel Tales came up with the idea of developing a series of connected games that would be distributed along with the books, to keep the subscribers interested.”

Said book club subscription was horse-themed, so having horses as the central subject matter was the obvious choice. 

“We wanted to do something different than what most horse games were doing though,” Johan explains – even in 2004, the same handful of horse game setup tropes were already going strong. “We were fans of fantasy adventures, and of larger-than-life stories,” he goes on. “Our core concept was always something like ‘Harry Potter meets Black Beauty’”. 

Since then, the essential philosophy of Star Stable games has remained largely the same: “Girls deserve real games too, and we want to make those. Initially, we did not have the budget or resources to fully deliver that, but the intent was always there.”

Market Potential: Then and Now

“‘Let’s make an MMORPG for tween girls’ can’t have been a popular pitch for industry investors at the time,” I posit. “How did the early SSO team overcome that and convince people of this project?”

“A big ‘Aha!’ moment was actually when we saw how players kept making fan videos on YouTube about riding their digital horses,” Johan tells me. “We were thinking ‘How do we take this online?’ We experimented with a flash-based 2.5D showjumping game for a while.”

But the flash game route didn’t feel right: riding through a big open world was the experience that the team wanted to offer. “Marcus Thorell, our creative director at the time, was playing… not necessarily healthy amounts of World of Warcraft,” Johan recalls. “We went ‘okay, how hard can it be, let’s make an MMO.’”

The game producer in me cringes at that prospect, but miraculously, it worked out well for Star Stable: A few months later, they had their first prototype where people could ride through that open world side by side. “That feeling was what we wanted, and it was obvious to us that this was going to work,” says Johan. 

How did it grow from there? “The original investors were people who had seen our journey so far, and who saw how much our players cared through those YouTube videos. The fact that World of Warcraft had a relatively large female player base was a factor as well.”

The people who joined along the way were often ones who already cared about the equine subject matter, either through family or by themselves. “Many people knew this ‘horse passion’ from personal experience,” Johan says, “and they knew that this is not something that goes away again easily.”

Now that SSO has been successfully running for a decade, one might assume that the industry caught up to the fact that horse lovers are a profitable audience. And yet, Star Stable Online barely has serious competition. Why is that? 

“I think people know that to make a successful horse game, you need to have people who are truly passionate about horses,” Johan surmises. “Not all of the original initiators of SSO had that passion, but we always made sure to work with people who did.”

Star Stable Entertainment has always been conscious in building up its equine knowledge base among its team – and in having a diverse staff: The SSE team is about 54% female, Johan tells me, which is the result of a deliberate effort in finding and retaining the right people. 

There is another aspect that makes the success of SSO daunting to replicate though: its sheer breadth of content. “Star Stable Online has lots and lots of content, so much that it can sometimes get confusing – and we still don’t cover every area of what players might want,” Johan admits. “It has grown over such a long time. Star Stable was always intended to be an everlasting journey, something that grows and evolves. That is incredibly difficult to do ‘now’, it’s very much a long term thing.” 

I am reminded of previous talks I’ve had with publishers of low budget horse games and opinions I’ve heard in the industry over the past few years: People claim that bigger budgets make no sense for horse games because there aren’t more people interested in this type of game, but when the success of Star Stable is mentioned, people consider it an entirely different beast, its scope unattainable and its success irreplicable. 

A Decade in the Saddle 

“So what’s the most important way in which SSO and its development have changed and evolved in all this time?” I want to know. “In a way,” Johan begins, “We’ve changed less than you might expect. In the beginning, we had this game that took you less than a day to finish. That was the original idea behind weekly updates, to keep players coming back to see what was new. This aspect has not changed. What’s different is that the bar has been raised over and over.”

Alex Cloudmill through the ages.

Reminiscing about those early days, Johan tells me that “Our philosophy was always to release quickly, get feedback, iterate, release, fail, and improve. I like to tell people that the original SSO was built by a ragtag band of rascals out of duct tape and straw. ”

I laugh at the image. It perfectly fits with that let’s make an MMO, how hard can it be sentiment from earlier. 

“We’ve been building on top of that ever since,” Johan goes on. “And that’s been a challenge: We are constructing a ship that’s on a constant journey around the world. We have to change the masts, change the sails and feed the crew, all without being allowed to dock in a harbor.”

I’m inevitably reminded of the travel metaphors I’ve heard from other game publishers. It would seem that Star Stable has found a more sustainable long-term approach here. 

“Scope and Quality are really the biggest changes over time,” Johan says. For a long time, we didn’t really focus on improving the game for new players, but were adding more at the end. A lot of the assets we were working with” — Johan mentions the old Silverglade Village, and the character models of the Soul Riders as examples — “were about fifteen years old before we finally exchanged them, because those were initially created for the Starshine Legacy games and then reused in SSO.”

Some of those age-old avatars are still in the game today, like Conrad the Moorland Blacksmith. 

Many Goals Left to Reach

With the tenth anniversary now past, and much of that old baggage being in the process of being replaced and modernized, what’s the big picture for Star Stable’s future according to Johan?

“There are plenty more goals to reach,” he replies to that prompt. “We want to keep working on diversity and inclusion. We want more ways for players to present themselves and feel represented – not only through the player avatar, but also in the world around them. We want to improve the experience of horse riding and bonding with your horse. And with the mobile version, we’re working on letting players take the experience wherever they go – we want SSO to be where our players are. We’ll continue to listen to our players, take feedback and incorporate it.” 

If you’re a slow player like myself, you’ll have plenty to do in SSO. If you’ve been playing for years, your quest log will look a lot less crowded.

Confirming what Stacy has already told me a few weeks earlier, Johan also emphasizes the importance of continuing SSO’s main quest line here: “We want to tell more spectacular stories with our fantastic cast of characters, and let the players be a part of the Soul Riders.” 

Johan mentions that the recently continued Soul Rider book series has helped the team really get into the characters’ heads. 

“A lot of our players are at the ‘end’ of the currently available story. We want to give them more opportunity to interact with the characters that we know and love. Continuing the main story is a continued effort, and it takes time.”

In the short term, both Johan and Stacy are stoked for the upcoming Halloween event. “Galloper Thomson will be a big part of it again this year, after Ydris took over last time around,” Johan teases. 

As our call nears its end, Johan emphasizes the importance of player feedback for the team once more. “Please keep bombarding us with love and ideas for improvement,” he says. “Keep playing, keep interacting with us — with love and respect, but with honesty. We’ll be glad to have you with us for the next ten years.”

Closing Thoughts

My conversations with both Stacy and Johan leave me hopeful for what will come next in Star Stable Online. It is always easy to ask game creators to fix all their big, underlying issues — now that the SSO team is doing just that, players will have to exercise a bit of patience to see the effects. 

We’ll see and judge the actual changes and improvements over the course of the coming months and years, but the fact that the team is planning so far ahead and pushing for this longevity rather than short-term gains sounds incredibly promising to me. 

As a casual SSO player who picks up the game for a few days or weeks here and there and then puts it down again for months at a time, I am optimistic for the future, and for what new things Jorvik will offer me the next time I pay it a visit. 

And as someone with a huge emotional investment in the entire horse game genre, I will keep pointing to Star Stable as proof that our niche deserves to be catered to. 

Birthday Box Giveaway! 

The Star Stable PR team has generously sent me a 10th anniversary mystery box with a big bunch of celebratory gifts, from stickers and balloons to a soundtrack vinyl and a gaming headset. More relevant to you though: They’ve promised a second box for one of my readers! (And yes, I’m hiding this bit at the end of this long article because I want to reward those of you who actually read 😂)

Do you want to get this super cool package of SSO swag, including a gaming headset (!), soundtrack vinyl, an incredibly shiny mug and more?
Sign up using this form. A winner will be chosen randomly from all participants on October 31st. The winner will be contacted by email, and has to respond with their name and shipping address within 14 Days, or the prize will be passed to another participant. The winner’s name and address will be passed to the Star Stable Online team to handle shipping.