Please do not call me a liar. It's unneeded.
Fair enough, but that what you said was not correct, for whatever reason, was something that did need to be said.
The difference between a blog, an opinion piece, or a newspaper editorial is largely ethereal now. Anything could be reduced to "one guy saying what he thinks about a particular issue". It's not a public blog. The Economist is not letting just anyone post on their site. It's sanctions content, likely edited, approved, and very possibly even paid work.
You're making a number of allusions and "might be's" to carry your point, even though they don't actually conclusively demonstrate anything. The idea that "the difference between a blog [...] and a newspaper editorial is largely ethereal now," for instance, is your opinion, and one that's fairly easy to refute. What someone writes on Wordpress is not the same as a New York Times editorial piece, and yet your statement there would presume that any difference between them is "ethereal."
Not anything can be reduced to one guy saying what he thinks, since as I noted previously there's a difference between an article that is done in the name of an institution and one person giving their personal opinion on something, even if using that particular institution's platform. Moreover, you don't know that the content is edited, approved, or paid, so mentioning those as
possibly conferring legitimacy is disingenuous.
The difference between it and an editorial is format in that it is a digital piece. A YouTube piece shot on a digital camera is still a "film" despite never existing on that medium or being shown in a theater.
I'm not sure why you're bringing up issues of digital format; that doesn't seem relevant in the slightest.
That's what all conversation is on this site, but it would be the height of rudeness to just reply to a poster with "you're just one poster saying what they think".
That doesn't mean it's not true.
I did not conveniently forget to mention them but simply did not come across those in my Google search. Please do not misattribute my motives.
Please do not presume that I'm speaking to your motives. The fact was that your overview of the situation didn't present both sides of the reactions to Kickstarter's statement; that this was convenient for the point you were asserting is self-evident. That was the salient point; if you didn't like the rhetoric about having "forgotten" to do so, then that's fair enough, but largely immaterial to the wider issue of a lack of citations regarding differing opinions.
This is a semantic argument. Kickstarter is not a store, no. But it functions as one. That was the whole damn point of the paragraph.
Kickstarter does not "function" as a store; rather, it's "treated" as one. This is not a semantic difference, so much as it is a technicality (which is also not a semantic difference - irony for the win!
). Even if the two things seem very alike, they're not alike.
Whether or not it is literally a store is irrelevant if it serves the same function. For purposes of this discussion, we can treat it as a store.
No, we can't. People treating it like a store is relevant, because that goes to the heart of the argument with regard to people thinking that it's a retailer, which in turn influences their thinking with regards to it supposedly "competing" with brick-and-mortar stores. Given that there has not been any hard data to speak of in this regard, this entire debate is still in the realm of opinions, and therefore the perceptions in that regard are an important part of what's being debated here.
Whether or not Kickstarter is literally or functionally a store has no bearing on whether or not Kickstarter engages in competition with stores in the same way that a KFC competes with McDonald's despite not being a burger store.
Except that we have already established that this isn't the case, as per the above.
Amazon is irrelevant as you are pre-ordering something that exists or will exist. We are specifically talking about gaming products not products in general.
The mention of Amazon was purely as an example to illustrate the larger point, which you don't seem to have responded to. Switch it out with a pre-order placed on Paizo, for instance, and the point remains exactly the same.
And many, many 3rd Party gaming products (prior to Kickstarter) very much were funded in part by pre-orders. Sometimes this worked (Tome of Horrors Complete) and sometimes it didn't work out so well (Razor Coast… for a time). Kickstarter replaced this function of the publisher's online store. It has taken over part of the storefront.
No, it hasn't. Even if we leave aside that you've expanded into an area reserved
solely for online retailers when the topic is focused on brick-and-mortar stores, this still ignores the fact that pre-orders and patronage pledges might look alike, but are still different. To whit, you're not actually charged when you make a patronage pledge unless it reaches a specific amount of funding within a specific amount of time, which isn't the case for a pre-order, where the money changes hands immediately. Moreover, you're wrong to state that Kickstarter has "taken over" anything, as pre-orders are still held all the time by companies, distinct from patronage drives; this "function" is still very much intact, which wouldn't be the case if Kickstarter was a competitor.
I never said Kickstarter refunds you. I said that prior to Kickstart, publishers would occasionally issue refunds on pre-orders for failed projects. It's not identical, but functionally similar to the Kickstarter process
I never said that it wasn't similar. The point being that these areas are similar
but still different, which serve to highlight that the two are not the same, and that these differences are important in that regard.
Has anyone ever done that though? Not for Kickstarter in general but RPG Kickstarters.
I imagine it would be possible to compare backer numbers with claimed rewards. I expect a statistically irrelevant sampling.
Again, that's less important than the fact that it could be done, directly undercutting your presumption that Kickstarter necessarily serves the same function as a retailer because there are pledges whereby you
must receive a reward when you pledge. The fact remains that this isn't true; I don't think it's popular either, but that's not the point - you can treat thing X as thing Y, but that won't actually make it into thing Y.
Again, I'm not claiming Kickstarter is a storefront. That's a misrepresentation of my argument. I'm saying it serves the same purpose and competes with stores, both digital and physical.
Likewise, I'm not saying that people can't treat Kickstarter as a storefront, but even though that method of using it (and thinking about it) means that you'd expect it to act as a competitor to brick-and-mortar retailers doesn't mean that's necessarily so. Given that there's no hard-and-fast evidence to suggest otherwise, that means that the "it must be competitive" argument stems from the presumption that a non-retail outlet is being thought of that way, which doesn't follow.
That was an error on my part. I was actually referring to Agate RPG (of Agate Éditions). I googled to correct my spelling (which was wrong), and Google said "Did you mean…". I wondered and wanted to go back and double-check but forgot.
In any event Agate RPG does not operate a store where you can buy their physical books.
Which means that it's not acting in competition with any other stores either, particularly since any books that they Kickstart wouldn't be available from any other outlets anyway.
This is a lovely semantic argument that doesn't actually debate ANY of my claims, and just points out possible errors in my terms. It's arguing without actually advancing the discussion.
I accept that I made an error in direct versus indirect competition because of the use of "or" rather than "and". I can therefor "upgrade" Kickstarter to being in direct competition with retail stores and the rest of my argument continues unchanged.
In fact, what I made was a lovely rational argument, since it neatly limits the scope of the discussion to direct competition. You'll further note that I took it as a given that your argument was with regards to direct competition after I posted that, since that's really the only way to even have this debate - no one is holding that Kickstarter doesn't indirectly compete for discretionary dollars, after all. Hence, the rest of your argument does indeed continue unchanged, but so do my rebuttals.
Yes. This also applies if the product is not available in stores but with a lapsed Kickstarter.
However the argument is NOT that Kickstarter replaces retail stores - that's not a requirement of competition - only that it takes away business and money.
That argument still does not speak to the fact that when the Kickstarter is going on, there's no way there can be direct competition because the product is not available in retail stores, or vice versa after the Kickstarter ends. You can't compete over dollars for the same product if other venues for acquisition don't have that product.
But this is not guaranteed. Many stores do not do sales, have only limited sales, or exclude premium items. And some stores also charge more than the MSRP, especially for non-standard or exclusive goods. The only local game store in my area (primarily a comic store) is pretty bad at gouging.
But this is irrelevant because we're working with average price as set by the MSRP rather than variance based on local sales, exchange rate variance, local interest in games, used copies, etc.
You're attempting to reframe the scope of the debate here by mandating that we're (apparently only) working with average prices set by the MSRP; in fact there's no reason to presume such a restriction. Variability of local circumstances can and will apply; there's no reason to limit the debate to abstractions, as we're trying to debate the issues regarding what's actually happening between Kickstarter and retailers.
If I hear about a game on Kickstarter and opt to buy it at my FLGS I can expect a wait similar to that of backers if not longer. Thus, for purposes of that individual product, the wait does not matter.
In terms of a
comparative wait this is true. However, this only serves to undercut the presumption of competition more, since there can't be said to be any particular advantage of speed in a Kickstarter order versus receiving it from a physical store.
Over the lifespan of a game, from funding to being in stores, there will be a finite number of sales. Prior to Kickstarter 100% of those sales would take place in a store of some kind, be it physical or digital. Now games are being acquired through Kickstarter and some percentage of sales is being taken away from stores.
This is a deceptive statement, because it looks only at the total number of transactions taking place, rather than in terms of the actual amount of money changing hands. Even if the percentage goes down, if the total amount of real money is greater, then a smaller percentage can still result in greater overall profits, meaning that any competitive aspect is purely theoretical. Having 100% of the sales for a product that doesn't exist (e.g. no sales at all) is still less actual profit than (to pick a number randomly) 80% of the sales of a product that does.
While not all of those games would have been made without the easy crowdfunding Kickstarter provides, some would have been funded through other means: investors, bank loans, getting into debt, or traditional pre-sales.
The flipside to this coin is that those books that wouldn't have existed if not for Kickstarter had some sales in retail outlets, which earned those outlets sales that they wouldn't have had otherwise. In this scenario, not only is Kickstarter not a competitor, but it's actually giving the retailers more money than they would have made otherwise.
Additionally, people have a limited amount of disposable income that they spend on hobby entertainment. When those funds are spent on a Kickstarter they cannot be spent on another game. I have not yet purchased the card game Superfight entirely because I backed a couple Kickstarters and have no more disposable funds. (Kickstarters are also on a deadline, which adds the ticking clock element. The other game will be there later, making it easier to procrastinate.)
You said previously that you were going to restrict your argument to direct competition. Citing possibly spending that money on different products is an argument towards indirect competition. Nobody is arguing that there's only so much discretionary spending to go around.
Wait… what?! When I wrote this, I was already assuming indirect competition.
You had said that, but several of your points were with regard to direct competition (e.g. different venues by which to acquire the same product).
You literally just corrected me on direct vs indirect, then changed your mind and criticized me for shifting my point of comparison. In the same post!
To reiterate, you
said you were going to stick to indirect competition, only to then start talking about competition between venues for the exact same product (e.g. direct competition), and then shifted to talking about different products being sold in different venues (e.g indirect competition). To put it another way, you were going back and forth in defiance of your earlier resolution to stick to indirect competition.
I mention shipping costs later.
Taxes are important. I pay them on most purchases in stores but not all Kickstarters. That's another 5%.
It's all important, which is why they need to be mentioned in conjunction with talking about the presumed competitive aspects of differing costs.
Unfair competition is still competition. This is like claiming Paizo.com doesn't compete with game stores because they can offer print + PDF bundles.
But that undercuts your comparison of which product is cheaper, since your not comparing the monetary value of the same material.
I was using it as a representative example of the general discounted price of Bones bought via Kickstarter rather than separately and individually. It is a huge discount.
Again, that doesn't change the fact that this wasn't a direct price comparison, since there were hidden costs that you weren't taking into account. It's like talking about the price of a car being what's written on the windshield in soap; there's more than what's listed there, and comparing issues of savings requires those to be brought up.
Oh, and yes you can buy the add-on. As you yourself mention, you can select "no reward" when backing. So you can add onto a $1 donation, for an insignificant price increase. (I did this exact thing for Bones 3, opting not to get the core sets and just add-ons.)
You're supporting my point here, which is that you have to pay something else, which isn't something that you were acknowledging before.
That it is no longer available is irrelevant. What is relevant is that 8,396 who want the game and would likely have otherwise bought the game from a store instead bought it elsewhere.
It's extremely relevant, because those 8,396 people
didn't have the option of acquiring it anywhere else, and were likely aware of that at the time they made their pledges.
And, again, Kickstarter just provides a new option for funding. Cryptozoic Entertainment is an established company who has made other games and could have gone into debt to make the game or approached other investors. (Or even done pre-orders on their store website.) There is very much a possibility they could have funded and made this available in stores without Kickstarter, but Kickstarter is just faster and likely more profitable. After all, they had enough money to acquire the licence to make a game for a popular IP.
No one is denying that Kickstarter provides new options for funding: that option is called "crowd-funding" after all. But that doesn't mean that it's necessarily introducing a competitive element with regard to traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, except insofar as there's now something else on which discretionary money can be spent. But the presumption that something would necessarily have existed otherwise is just that, a presumption; you can't argue to the inevitability of something's existence unless you have insider information with regards to the entire process. Saying "it went this way, but I'm sure it could have gone that way" isn't a counterpoint.
Agreed. But price was too big not to talk about. It's not always relevant, but it's relevant often enough.
I suppose, but given that it doesn't help to establish much.
No, of course the advantages don't place them in direct (or indirect) competition.
The fact that they're taking money for similar products is what puts them in competition. The advantage affect if Kickstarter is coming off on top of the competition or not. Or how often it's better to go with Kickstarter.
"Similar" - as in, "not the same" - products is
indirect competition. Not direct.
True. But not every game store has as much social media savy as Kickstarter, is as well known, or has as much reach. If I find a cool game at the local comic shop that means nothing to someone in a different province or the States. But everyone knows Kickstarter and recognises it.
Just because social media might not be utilized to its fullest extent doesn't mean that Kickstarter inherently has the advantage in that area. Likewise, local stores don't need to be as well-known, since they only need to focus their efforts on the local customer base; having less friends on Facebook can still be a net gain if they're all friends who are there in your city of operation.
People are always talking about new Kickstarter projects or sharing them because the information (and a link) is easy to transmit. If I discover a great new game, I can mention it but unless I find a link to the game's site it's just that little bit harder to investigate. There's a barrier there, even if ever so slight...
I suspect that it's so slight as to be largely theoretical; social media presence is largely a requirement for businesses nowadays, and I can't remember the last time I heard of a game store that didn't have a Facebook page and a Twitter account. Not to mention that customers can also utilize those on their own, which has the advantage of meaning that the people who likely know them and follow them (e.g. their local friends who use social media as another communication platform) are more likely to pay attention when they Tweet or post something cool happening at the local store.
It's not impossible, but browsing a game store is significantly less common than browsing Twitter or Facebook.
A game store might be active and social media and attract your attention with something cool, but as often as not, game store advertising is less focused and unrelated products. But people you follow on Twitter or Facebook with similar interests linking a Kickstarter project is instantly more attractive and relevant, being the ultimate in targeted marketing.
Summarizing, not all game stores are equally present in social media, and even the ones that are are unlikely to be as focused as a good Kickstarter.
As noted above, I don't think this is necessarily as true as you're making it out to be. Local retailers have the advantage where getting the word out via social media is concerned, since the people who are most likely to pay attention to them are also most likely to be their customers in the first place, and the people they mention it to are also more likely to pay attention and then likewise be interested. Furthermore, even Tweeting about unrelated products can be a boon for game stores, as getting someone in means that they're a lot more likely to buy something, even if it's not the product they were originally looking for, which is distinct from Kickstarter; you don't usually decide to pledge for product Y because product X also looked cool.
It's a difference in time limit. Changing my mind in a retail store is a matter of minutes. I can sleep on a Kickstarter purchase. I can cancel weeks after if I have a change in finances.
Except you can sleep on the store purchase too; there's no inherent factor that keeps you from coming back later.
Again, this is not an all-or-nothing situation. Nothing in life is either-or. Kickstarters absolutely have their disadvantages and game stores (either digital or meat space) can have their advantages and benefits. The argument isn't "Kickstarter is better all the time" or "Kickstarter is replacing game stores" but if Kickstarter competes with game stores and reduces sales. Any sales.
No, not "any" sales; only sales of the same product. Kickstarters have their advantages and disadvantages, but that does not mean that they compete with brick-and-mortar retailers and necessarily impact sales of the same books that are being sold in those stores.
I don't recall saying it wasn't true with retail stores. If waiting for a reorder or a pre-order at a game store then, yes, it's true. But if just buying something off the shelf it's not.
You'd mentioned it as a "psychological advantage" of Kickstarter, presumably over that enjoyed by a local retailer, which isn't the case. You can absolutely anticipate something before it's at the game store, or conversely before you've gotten to the game store to buy it. Kickstarter has no particular advantage in this area, which means that it's not really a factor worth mentioning.
That's the difference. It's true for all Kickstarters versus only some retail purchases.
Except that it's not true for all Kickstarters; you don't necessarily have to anticipate what you've ordered. Alternatively, there's no reason why you necessarily can't anticipate something even when you simply spot it on the shelf, since there's the anticipation of taking it home to enjoy it.
It's certainly a feature/bug. For people who like it, it incentivizes Kickstarter. For people who dislike it, it incentivizes retail stores.
Again, it's not an issue of everyone favouring Kickstarter, just some people.
But again, if it's not a particular advantage (or disadvantage) for Kickstarter, and therefore does not incentivize them over a retail store (e.g. does not make them competitive with a retail store), then it's not worth mentioning within the scope of this discussion.
That's not a counterpoint as I explicitly say that Kickstarter isn't an e-store.
A salient point, then.
Again, I wrote my piece assuming indirect competition. Which is still competition.
The debate here was never if there was any competition at all, but if there was any direct competition. You did make reference to both types in your piece, though you don't seem to have realized it.
I'm not debating indirect competition in any regard, as that's a matter between differing products, which is another way of saying that you're competing for discretionary spending. Anything that costs money does that; this is about whether or not Kickstarter presents retail brick-and-mortar stores with direct competition.
Gaming products are small. A good 3rd Party product is lucky to sell 10,000 copies. So when 2,300 backers get Tome of Beasts via Kickstarter, that might a quarter of their total sales. That's a lot of reduced sales.
It's not reduced; those "sales" could not have come from anywhere else, and likewise if they hadn't happened then it's entirely reasonable to believe that the remaining 7,700 sales made by local retailers would never have happened. They gained 7,700 sales rather than losing 2,300, in other words.
As you are quick to point out, Kickstarter is not a store. And neither is it a wholesaler or distributer.
Hence why I said they're not a wholesaler. The example was illustrative.
So it is very different situation. Just because they're selling to retailers doesn't mean there's no competition.
But it does mean that there's no direct competition.
Kickstarter selling to retailers isn't fundamentally different than Paizo selling to game stores while also operating their own e-store. But it would be ridiculous to suggest Paizo's store doesn't compete with physical stores.
Paizo's store competes with physical stores because they're offering the same products, meaning that customers have different venues to choose from for the same materials. That's not the case with Kickstarter and retail outlets, since there's no overlap.
I prefer the term "educated guess". Or even "deductive reasoning". It's supposition, but not wrong.
The definition of "deductive reasoning" is that it leads to a
logically certain conclusion, which means that it's fact and not supposition. The term you're looking for is "abductive" reasoning.
Production costs are a non-issue. It may cost WotC $250,000 to print books but MTG generates tens of millions of dollars in profit each month. They could print a D&D book every other week for a year and just let them sit in a warehouse and they'd still make money that year.
There's evidence to suggest (e.g. an interview from several years ago with, if I recall correctly, Ryan Dancey) that the sales of Magic aren't used to prop up sales of other games that WotC makes, due to Hasbro dividing up the profit margins per brand instead of leaving them all under the umbrella of Wizards of the Coast. That may have changed, but the last that I've heard, WotC does not have the freedom to do that...which is a shame, since that's what they were doing before Hasbro acquired them, and it worked fairly well.
Kickstarter and Amazon do take a percentage, but this is likely much less than what the store and general distributor charge. So even if they they paid a fulfilment company to handle dealing with the customers and shipping and sold books at 30% off they'd still likely make more money via Kickstarter. And they still need to deal with stretch goals, higher reward tiers, and the like. It's a lot of extra work for limited gains.
WotC doesn't need Kickstarter to raise awareness. They just need to release a new book and send out review copies.
This is speculative. Whether or not the gains are limited or how much awareness they'd raise is entirely guesswork; one could very well note that they don't need to sell PDFs of out-of-print materials either, but they still pivoted and chose to do so, after previously deciding not to do so, after previously deciding to do so.
It actually seems to be Hasbro policy. WotC used to operate a game store that closed after the sale to Hasbro, and you can't buy products directly from Hasbro's website.
It seems to be a larger corporate directive to not deal with customers and work through stores.
This was, as I recall, part of WotC's "loss leader" strategy that I mentioned above. Yeah, Hasbro killed that one pretty quick.
By default it doesn't support or enable stores in that Kickstarter doesn't encourage people to go to stores, let alone Wizards Play Network stores. Kickstarter works against stores or, at best, is neutral to stores. Therefore it works against a policy of actively supporting stores.
Frankly, that would be a terrible idea. No offence intended. I'm not sure it'd even be possible to vette Kickstarter backers checking they are a retail outlet. But even if there was… terrible idea.
The catch is that retailers already "back" projects when they buy stock, which sits on their shelf until it is sold. They lose money until things sell.
Backing a Kickstarter is effectively keeping a percentage of their funds off the shelf and in limbo. It's not being used to buy product that makes more money. In the time it takes a Kickstarter to finish, produce its product, and ship the retailer could have used that same money to bring in an extra copy of a good-selling product multiple times, each time generating money.
Especially when game stores could buy and stock the product just as easily when it was ready to ship.
There's no incentive to back.
I don't agree, but quite frankly I don't care enough to debate the point. It was a tongue-in-cheek hypothetical, and the fact that it might be a terrible idea really doesn't matter that much, since we're talking about the same company that launched Gleemax.
If we stop debating things that lack a clear answer this site would be a lot more quiet...
On that note, I agree with you.
