Blacklist Miniatures Fantasy Set 1 - Failed $1M Kickstarter

[Marc Radle]

I backed this and I’m pretty frustrated at having lost those funds (I’m pretty confident we in the US will never see these minis)

I also doubt Blacklist will continue as a company - who will ever trust them or back them again??

 

[kenada]

Launching a Kickstarter during the pandemic then blaming the pandemic for your woes is really lame.

 

[CubicsRube]

How much did the kickstarter go for? $1M? So they spent 90% on production costs? If so that makes no sense whatsoever.

On top of the red flags mentioned in other posts. they should have retained funds from prior projects that were quite successful. It sounds like they sunk most of that into early stages of future projects.

1) Actions to hold products is a last resort when the company is ready to damage relations. It means that people have been knocking on their door and asking for payment for quite a while first. Likely during the time they were launching another project. That's concerning.
2) Why the gofundme keeps getting taken down is odd and I would think another red flag.
3) It's a PROFORMA invoice, not PROFORMAL. While it doesn't necessarily point to the invoice being fake, it's unusual a company would have this typo on the header of their invoice, as this is usually automated.

EDIT: I browsed the gofundme terms and conditions. One condition is that goods (or services) are not provided in exchange for donations, which was likely why it was taken down. If so, then it doesn't speak well to their admin skills when it took me less than 1 minute to find.

 

[John Dallman]

The email I received late last night, so you can read straight from the company...

If you contribute $30, you will receive:

1. $40 credit towards a future crowdfunding campaign, which you can save or use with no expiration.

If you contribute $60, you will receive:

1. $90 credit towards a future crowdfunding campaign, which you can save or use with no expiration.

They still aren't doing their arithmetic, are they? They're trying to raise money to let them deliver product they've already spent all their takings on, and they're doing it by borrowing from the income of future projects. They'll either have to charge enough for those future projects to make it up, which will make those projects expensive and unattractive, or they'll get stuck the same way again.

 

[Malmuria]

Here's a kickstarter that was mentioned in the million dollar kickstarter survivor thread. It's fairly typical as far as kickstarters go: a trailer, lots of glossy art, banners and charts of stretch goals, extras like dice and cards and maps and VTT stuff. Then a bit at the end, with no banner, about risks and challenges that amounts to the people they are working with "really know what they're doing!"

Most likely it will be ok, though maybe take a year or more for people to actually get their physical products. But the format does leave it open to bad, or more likely, incompetent actors. It seems at this point that kickstarter is basically regulating itself, and given that they always get their cut, not incentivized to do much about failed products.

In the TTRPG space, creators and freelancers are often underpaid and not paid on time, which is infuriating. At the same time, I think there can be good faith questions about the cost of a product and about how "worth it" something is. There are people who have issues with controlling spending (see: videogame monetization) or are susceptible to hype (see: NFTs, crypto) and then are made to feel totally at fault for their financial losses, with a platform like kickstarter taking its cut and basically bowing out of the process at that point.

 

[Retreater]

How much did the kickstarter go for? $1M? So they spent 90% on production costs? If so that makes no sense whatsoever.

$1,156,102 to be exact, many times over the initial funding goal.
I guess they did a poor job of estimating the costs and the increased expenses of the stretch goals. I think had they not gone overboard with the stretch goals, they'd have been successful.

 

[Malmuria]

$1,156,102 to be exact, many times over the initial funding goal.
I guess they did a poor job of estimating the costs and the increased expenses of the stretch goals. I think had they not gone overboard with the stretch goals, they'd have been successful.

But would they have made as much without overpromising on stretch goals?

 

[Sacrosanct]

But would they have made as much without overpromising on stretch goals?

Define "made". Cuz they made less and less the more that was pledged based on my above post. I.e., the more they had pledged, the more they promised (incurred costs) without bringing in any extra pledges. Therefore, the more pledges, the less they made, to the point it costs more than pledged.

Based on what I'm seeing, they would have made the most profit by not having stretch goals at all. A $7000 profit with no stretch goals is better than a $1800 loss with them.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

Well, that's $280 I spent on their follow-up Kickstarter for Fantasy set 1+2 that I won't be seeing again.

I'm in that boat too - thankfully I have Altar Quest and Hour of Need, and they had lots of extra to extend the life of the games.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

Double post