CastAR wants you to play tabletop games in mixed reality.
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CastAR’s collapse shows the incredible challenge of making AR games

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 5 min

CastAR was one of the most ambitious augmented reality game companies in the business. But it looks like it has shut down amid one of the most obvious problems in the fledgling industry: It was too early, and the challenges it faced were incredible.

CastAR failed to raise a new round of funding and shut down this week, according to a report from game news site Polygon. That spelled the end to a years-long project by former Valve employees Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson to create a unique AR tabletop gaming platform, one that wanted to deliver the next step in a magical kind of play.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.