Tell your overdue Kickstarter story

Morrus said:

You're in a thread about the failures. You're not hearing about the 99% which are awesome crowdfunders which fund and deliver successfully.

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I get that, but its still notable that the failures disproportionately include physical products, especially non-book items.

Ulfgeir said:

I have not. Though the time travel part isn't my cup of tea. Time travel works well on film. In a rpg not so much imo.

And the kickstarter I backed was started way before Evil Hat's game.

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The time travel in Fate of Cthulhu is more a background element, explaining why the PCs are doing what they're doing. You don't have PC's hopping back and forth between the future and the modern day. Think Kyle Reese in Terminator: he knows he has been sent on a one-way trip, and he does not expect to get back except for (if all goes well) the long way.

Thomas Shey said:

I get that, but its still notable that the failures disproportionately include physical products, especially non-book items.

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Well, physical products are much harder to make than digital ones.

Morrus said:

Well, physical products are much harder to make than digital ones.

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I think Covid and the disruptions it caused is to blame for many of these failures. The disruptions to Chinese manufacturing as well as shipping caused production costs to rise in ways sellers had not accounted for, and did not have the margins to cover. Digital stuff is of course not as affected by these issues.

Staffan said:

I think Covid and the disruptions it caused is to blame for many of these failures. The disruptions to Chinese manufacturing as well as shipping caused production costs to rise in ways sellers had not accounted for, and did not have the margins to cover. Digital stuff is of course not as affected by these issues.

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Logistics is one of the bigger challenges, yep.

GM Lent said:

As did I, and same.

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For Fantasy Series 1, many North American backers eventually received the product (honestly a decent-quality set of minis), but no thanks to Blacklist Games. Distributor QML eventually brokered having backers pay for shipping a second time through a third party, but this was after Alex Lim (Blacklist's owner) let the product languish in storage for months while making increasingly inane excuses and THEN attempting and later retracting a GoFundMe, ostensibly for this purpose. Lim is a fascinating case study in the dangers of serial crowdfunding to say the least.

Morrus said:

Well, physical products are much harder to make than digital ones.

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Which was kind of the point I was alluding to; it produces a lot more failure states than a digital one, and thus more likely to leave you hanging. Its an extension of why I think physical stretch goals are a mistake.

Thomas Shey said:

Which was kind of the point I was alluding to; it produces a lot more failure states than a digital one, and thus more likely to leave you hanging. Its an extension of why I think physical stretch goals are a mistake.

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Yup. We don’t ever have physical stretch goals at ENP. It’s just asking for trouble.

Morrus said:

Yup. We don’t ever have physical stretch goals at ENP. It’s just asking for trouble.

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I notice most of the experienced producers don't; even if they haven't had problems themselves, I think they've noticed the problem with others.

(This is excluding the people specifically making things like dice, where you takes your chances or you stay out).

I think there can be a place for physical stretch goals, but you'd need to be careful with them. I think one place where they can be useful is material extracted from the main product, where minimal development effort is needed for the stretch goal. I'm thinking of things like cards containing various elements on them (conditions, spells/powers, gear), or maybe cardboard pawns using the monster/NPC illustrations you already commissioned. But you should be careful to check the prices for that kind of thing before doing your kickstarter so you know how much they'll set you back and thus how much extra the kickstarter needs to bring in. And you should only do it if the kickstarter is pretty much ready to go (with maybe a brief backer preview/review period), because if the KS is supposed to fund future development (as opposed to recoup the costs for development you already did) there's no guarantee that the price you were quoted for a deck of cards will remain the same a year from now.