Reaper Bones II kickstarter --It's Over! $3mil reveal inside

frankthedm said:

The KS comments . Had a nasty stew of anger going. I saw some legit complaints, but so much of it felt it was coming from...

• Reaper not trying to get around customs (Pass to a Partner Company in a country, then ship)
• Higher international shipping.
• Reaper not underdeclaring international pledges
• Prices higher for the model amounts so Reaper would do better than just breaking even.

Maybe there were a lot of lingering Chan board types from when they were drawn in by KS1's Cthulhu.

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That's too bad. This is still an incredible deal for the minis (at least for the USA buyers). Yeah, having to deal with international shipping is a pain, but either fund or do not fund -- vote using $$ instead of vitriol.

frankthedm said:

Prices higher for the model amounts so Reaper would do better than just breaking even.

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The nerve of those Reaper people! How dare they try and make a profit from a venture that requires them to invest hundreds, if not thousands of hours of effort into!

I don't think Reaper ran this Kickstarter as well as the first one, but I don't see how you can get angry at them for trying to make a profit from their work. Do some people not understand basic business?

While I'm very satisfied with the results, I think it was a bit (relatively speaking, of course) disappointing how the 2013 core set measures when compared with the one from the first KS. IMHO the Reaper guys branched a bit too much with the three core expansions, and not having steadier additions to the core set (the last true addition was at 1.8 million). I keep thinking that if there had been more core set additions instead of optional add-ons and expansions the final amount would have been greater. But maybe everything turned out as they intended.

Dimitri Mazieres said:

While I'm very satisfied with the results, I think it was a bit (relatively speaking, of course) disappointing how the 2013 core set measures when compared with the one from the first KS. IMHO the Reaper guys branched a bit too much with the three core expansions, and not having steadier additions to the core set (the last true addition was at 1.8 million). I keep thinking that if there had been more core set additions instead of optional add-ons and expansions the final amount would have been greater. But maybe everything turned out as they intended.

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I think Reaper's problem was that they had so many core additions right at the start of the campaign, so they very quickly got close to the point where they couldn’t add many more items to the core set and still be profitable for them.

So after Day 1, there was only like a dozen minis added to the core set. If they’d spread the core additions out a little more I think people wouldn’t have felt like very little was added to the core set, even though we would have had the same amount of minis in the end.

I too lost interest in the middle of the campaign when many of the stretch goals were for additions to expansion sets. Surely it would have been better to spread these out more with core set stretch goals and option stretch goals.

Not likely mutants, no evidence of treason....

Olaf the Stout said:

I don't think Reaper ran this Kickstarter as well as the first one,

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They did seem a bit less willing to put up with crap this time, but since a lot of them have ownership stakes in their company, that is their call. The meager employee is shacked to The Customer is Always Right. An owner gets to decide "You're not worth the money, Go Away."

Do some people not understand basic business?

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I think our friend the Computer is more suspicions of things other than their competence.

frankthedm said:

They did seem a bit less willing to put up with crap this time, but since a lot of them have ownership stakes in their company, that is their call. The meager employee is shacked to The Customer is Always Right. An owner gets to decide "You're not worth the money, Go Away."

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I only read and posted in the comments a couple of times, so I wasn't referring to how Reaper may have handed that side of things. Were they a bit less willing to put up with some of the whiny backers this time around?

My comments were more in regards to how they managed and ordered their stretch goals in regards to the core, option, expansion and trick card additions.

I felt like the campaign lost a lot of steam in the middle of the campaign as they had multiple goals one after the other for expansion set #2 and #3. I wasn't interested in either of those, so it meant there was a long period of time where the campaign wasn't of much interest to me.

The first time around I was eagerly following it, waiting to see what the next option or core set addition was. On another forum I post on this was a common comment, so I was not alone there.

I think that came about because so many additions were made to the core set on day 1. I backed the campaign as soon as I woke up and knew the campaign was live (I'm in Australia, so this was almost 10 hours after it had started). By this point in time most of the additions to the core set had alreafy been made.

If they'd spaced those core set additions out across the campaign I think there would have been less of a perception that the deal wasn't as good this time around. The core set the second time around was pretty comparable to the first time. It was just that most of the addition to this set happened on Day 1 and there was only drip-fed additions to it over the next 4 weeks of the Kickstarter.

I agree almost completely with Olaf, and I also felt less excited following the KS this time around. Also, the core set ended up with something like 150+ minis (I'm not counting the bases) against last year's 240+ vampire package. So, yeah, I think all those $50 expansions and optional add-ons had an impact on the whole.
Then again, I'm looking at it from a consumer's perspective. Maybe the final sales figures are more profitable with this model.

Dimitri Mazieres said:

I agree almost completely with Olaf, and I also felt less excited following the KS this time around. Also, the core set ended up with something like 150+ minis (I'm not counting the bases) against last year's 240+ vampire package. So, yeah, I think all those $50 expansions and optional add-ons had an impact on the whole.
Then again, I'm looking at it from a consumer's perspective. Maybe the final sales figures are more profitable with this model.

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Hmm, I didn't realise the difference in model count between the Bones I Vampire and Bones II Core Set was so large. I could be wrong again, but did the Bones II Core Set have a greater number of large figures?

Olaf the Stout said:

Hmm, I didn't realise the difference in model count between the Bones I Vampire and Bones II Core Set was so large. I could be wrong again, but did the Bones II Core Set have a greater number of large figures?

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Nothing significant that I can see with a cursory glance, no.

Dimitri Mazieres said:

I agree almost completely with Olaf, and I also felt less excited following the KS this time around. Also, the core set ended up with something like 150+ minis (I'm not counting the bases) against last year's 240+ vampire package.

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As I said

Prices higher for the model amounts so Reaper would do better than just breaking even.

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First time the figs were cheaper than some minis I've gotten out of gumball machines. And I mean cheap ass U.S.A. gumball machines, not higher end Gashapon machines.