What FFG and CMON (and Asmodee) have in common, I think, is that, since they have multiple game lines (namely boardgames), that they only keep in-print those games that have the best ROI. It doesn't matter if *you* like the game (and spent hundreds of dollars on it), if the books don't show a ROI, or if the company no longer supports the employee's pet project, there goes the support for the game. In fact, Asmodee took this one step further, buying game companies and only continuing to publish their best-sellers -- these companies didn't even produce new boardgames.
100% on point and agreed. The other thing here is that unlike traditional board games, the ROI on a lifestyle game can take time to materialize - the buy-in and level of commitment required to get the game to "critical mass" of profitability takes more time and a bit of a proven track to accomplish and you aren't selling people a product but rather getting them to invest into a whole new hobby. I've heard that a lot of lifestyle type games usually take a couple years to break even/become profitable, and the design/development costs for them are deceptively higher (traditional board games might have a
dev team juggling multiple games at once, whereas lifestyle games usually have a few dedicated full time employees working only on that product line, they also have to work well in advance of the release schedule meaning that you'll always be looking at higher costs relative to a traditional one-and-done game as you are always paying for the development of products that have yet to be released or generate revenue in return) so if all you're looking at is a spreadsheet of the financial performance of the different games you might not get the full story.
I *think* KS is a bad business model for new "lifestyle" games, since you have a huge at-once buy in (hundreds of dollars in one campaign, rather than over a period of time through retail) and have to be the one supplying all the mini's, rather than the "lifestyle" convention of each player buying their own stuff. "Lifestyle" games that already have a large pre-KS fanbase (eg. Vampire CCG, Confrontation, Doomtown) seem to be successful, though. However, note that these "lifestyle" games are typically the creator's only product, so they have more of a stake in supporting the line.
Agreed again. I think theres only really been two successful lifestyle games funded via kickstarter - A Song of Ice & Fire Miniatures Game (which surprised many with its robust post-Kickstarter support relative to CMONs previous attempts, I think this is also a testament to the quality of the gameplay itself as well as the fact that it filled a market void/niche that had recently been abandoned by the 10-ton industry gorilla), and Kingdom Death (completely different type of lifestyle game with a completely different business model. Arguably it has succeeded in spite of itself). There have been various other successful games which blurred the lines between a traditional boardgame and a lifestyle game (zombicide and aeons end are the ones that come to mind most immediately), but I wouldn't necessarily categorize them as "lifestyle" as they are relatively self-contained experiences vs something with continual support, updates, errata, and "expansion" releases that rely on a base-game to play. Otherwise you have a long list of games that have floundered (Warcaster, The Other Side, Riot Quest - which I think has only really managed to float itself based on the utility of the minis in games of Warmachine/Hordes rather than because people actually care about the game itself, Dropfleet Commander, Wrath of Kings, etc.). As you said I think the big up-front buy-in, coupled with a lengthy delay to release, is a real killer for these games. The excitement that you generate during a campaign often dies out by the time the game hits market.
Additionally, it seems like most of these games struggle with a continual flow of releases post-
KS delivery, often because the margins on
KS aren't really all that great and most of the funds are chewed up delivering rewards leaving little room to develop, produce, and release additional waves of content to continue feeding the machine. In general the trend with games like this is that they live so long as there is a steady stream of new content for the community to consume. If that stream of content dries up then you usually lose all but the few die-hards as they move to other pastures to graze, you might be able to lure some of them back in the future, but often it seems once the crowd goes, they're gone for good and never coming back.
I think Kickstarters also set lifestyle games up to fail with a painfully elongated development cycle - for most lifestyle product lines like these its usually its 2 years of
dev work up front before you can release any product, and thats true with Kickstarter as well. The problem is that the economics and expectations of kickstarter (you have to offer a lot of value to backers and operate on slim margins) means that your first wave of releases via kickstarter are usually much larger than they would be if you went direct-to-retail, the downside of this is that you're developing all that content in one big batch and that chews up all your bandwidth, leaving you no room to work on the crucial follow-on waves in an organic rolling fashion. Ideally you would want to release a new product every 2-3 months at maximum, but instead with Kickstarter you're basically dumping everything out at once after 2 years of work, sometimes you deliver rewards in waves and that second wave comes after another year or so in a best case scenario, but after that you're basically stuck in a rut where you have no additional product forthcoming for at least 1-2 years post-delivery as you haven't really had the bandwidth to support and develop that until this point, but a lot can happen in that timeframe to suck the wind out of your products sales.
And that doesn't even get into the retail dynamics of all this - lifestyle games for the most part live and die by the amount of shelf space they occupy in retail stores where people will purchase and play with them. Oftentimes retailers are reluctant to stock kickstarter product on shelves as usually you will find that the majority of people who would buy that product have already done so directly from the publisher via kickstarter and late pledges, etc. Very few kickstarters really leave anything for retailers to sell, most of the time its the same product that everyone already has more than enough of, which causes the product to languish . If retailers can't sell what they have, they aren't going to order more of it from you, no matter what new stuff you might be putting out. Oftentimes they will also move this product into bargain bins after some time just to get it out the door and try to recoup some of the losses. Seeing these products at a steep discount is often an indicator to potential newcomers to the games community that its not a well-supported game, etc. which costs you sales as a result, and likewise often pisses off your existing customers who may have paid more for the products during the kickstarter campaign than it costs once those products hit clearance.
It's unfortunate that you need a good business sense as well as good game design for a game (or any creative idea) to be on the market. I don't see much overlap between the two, meaning that we could have *much* more creativity available to us than we have now.
It can be challenging for a small team to do both things simultaneously, usually the passion thats driving the creative aspect of the design is at odds with what makes good sense form a business perspective and reconciling the two may often feel like a violation of artistic integrity. I think part of Games Workshops success (for example) has been the result of the decoupling of the creative aspect of the business from the actual management of the business and its operations (as much as we may complain about the practices that have resulted from that), whereas other companies like Privateer Press have struggled because they have failed to perform that same decoupling and allow business decisions to be informed and driven by those creative passions rather than cold hard logical analysis of the market, etc. I think its pretty telling that if you look at the "bout us" section of most kickstarters you usually see lots of people with titles like "game designer", "developer", "illustrator", "concept artist", etc. but rarely do you ever see "operations manager" or "accountant" or "market analyst", etc. As an aspiring designer/creator myself, I think the thing that other creators need more than anything else is to hire someone that is empowered to tell them "no", which is a pretty scary thing for someone working on something like this to think about. In my own case, for right now I don't need to as I'm too small an operation and too limited in scope to actually get myself into any trouble, but if I achieve some of my early growth goals, etc. and can shift towards working on some of my "grail" projects, I have the foresight to know that I would very quickly run the business into the ground making bad business decisions for the sake of living up to my ideals of artistic integrity and goals/desires.
. Between their connections to production in China and their work on board games I think it would be a decent fit. 
