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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gareman" data-source="post: 6761741" data-attributes="member: 4918">I backed products predicting certain customers would be interested, and they were. It's much like how every item I carry in the store (500 RPG titles for example) is speculative in this way. You buy it with your customer base in mind, including predicting depth of interest. In the case of Kickstarter, I backed products with customers and depth of interest in mind and then tried to market those products to those customers after the fact. "Hey, I've got this really cool game coming out by your favorite author, Monte Cook. Would you like to pre-order it?""Oh yeah, it's wonderful, isn't it ? I'm a backer at the super platinum level!" "I see." (kicking myself and reaizing I'm going to be stuck with half a dozen $60 books that nobody wants in 18 months, while I lose the opportunity cost on $180).This kind of discussion happened A LOT. In the case of board games, the revelation came with the quarterly "clearance cart." I had a cart full of board games that hadn't sold a single copy. Each one had good BGG ratings. The commonality? They were crowd funded. This is all early on, so just as I wanted to back EVERY game coming from KS, backers wanted to back them too. The success of KS has changed this a bit. There are simply too many games for everyone to back AND the quality of products can be described as no better or even slightly worse than conventionally financed game products. A lot of people got burned on low quality or undelivered product (myself included). But it also means there's nuance to what I support as a retailer, using metrics and research to cherry pick likely good sellers. Cool Mini Or Not, for example, sell very well for us. In the RPG space, Evil Hat products are mostly crowd funded and we do great with those. I will even give Evil Hat my money for the KS at a retail level because I like those guys. As for demand after the fact, sales generally peak in the first 30 days of a release. People who buy games in the first 30 days are "alpha" gamers. They are influencers, in marketing speak. They will report to their friends whether a product is good or not. For a crowd funded product, that can be good and bad for retailers. It's good because now that secondary customer will want the product and it generally won't be available direct from a source. They need the retailer. It's bad because there are often far, far fewer secondary customers, and in many cases, there are no secondary customers at all. So the demand for this product which would normally be high is much less or nonexistent. The way a specialty store like ours works is we bring in a huge number of products at one copy. About half of those products are "one and done." We sell it, it's gone, we don't re-order. We're banking on break out hits to raise up our sales and inventory efficiency. In the case of KS derived products, there is usually not enough "gas in the tank," not enough demand for a title to break out. It's also a problem because most KS games are "one and done" on the production side, so even if it's popular, the game quickly disappears after release, impeding our ability to sell that game long term. Eventually you find yourself with a lot of one and done KS games AND a lot of great, high demand games with no supply. It becomes a no win situation. Again, with some nuanced buying, you can cherry pick winners. However, the overall effect is most game store owners will avoid most Kickstarter derived titles.if this all sounds fuzzy, subjective, seat of the pants and a bit crazy, well that's the game trade!</blockquote>

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