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Interesting, i dont think he should have separated Hordes and Warmashine, he should have just put them over 40k in 4th and add another title to the list, unlinke WHF and 40K this games are interchangeable, they can play "cross" game, i actually see them as different armies/flavors of the same game, even if some armies are more popular than others. This does not hold true for GW, you cant play your empire army against space marines.

 WarOne wrote:

 Taarnak wrote:

WarOne wrote:
Such as it is, this data is nonannectdotal for this one particular location. As a whole they may be able to extrapolate regional trends.

No, it's anecdotal. There are no numbers of any kind listed for Kickstarted projects. Even then, a set of 1 is not enough to form any kind of factual conclusions.
~Eric

I believe that his conclusions have factual data behind them and are not anecdotal. Of course I used the qualifier believe so that does mean I trust the source it comes from.

His statement might, but they aren't presented here. Thus, anecdote. Also, sample size of 1 again. No trend, or meaningful opinion can be gleaned from that.

Also, we don't really know much about him or how he tried to sell the KS'd products. If he is a store owner who has heartburn about the whole situation he may not have tried to hard to sell that/those products and set them up for failure. Too many variables to accept it as fact.

~Eric

Noir wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
No, because in Poker the cards are not played out to influence the course of the game and thus the new cards you might want to or be able to add to your hand.

So it based of cards game like Gin. Can't really call it new mechanisms.

I'm assuming you've never played a deck building game then.

Deck builders are distinguished by their core mechanic: Every player starts the game with an identical starting deck, typically composed of low-grade resources used to buy new cards (copper in Dominion). Every turn you draw a hand of cards, and use those cards to purchase new cards from a common buy pool (either static or dynamic, depending on the particular game), which give you better resources, victory points, or deck manipulation abilities (more draws, the ability to purge cards, etc.). There's a lot of variation on the theme (High Command doesn't use a communal buy pool, LotRDBG lets you attack other players, and Miskatonic School for Girls lets you buy cards for your opponents), but the ability to modify your deck on the fly is the core of the genre.

Basically, just like gin. Except everyone has their own deck, and you start with only twos through ten of spades, and could use them to buy better cards. Oh, and hearts make you draw three extra cards next turn. So exactly like gin.

The sales information from a store may be called hard data but it is still anecdotal in the larger context of state, national or worldwide sales.

To make the data be considered "hard" it would also have to be comparable to other data. Since we know nothing about how these numbers were generated (we not even have any numbers at all ... just a ranking) nor are able to compare them to others we can only call it anecdotal. Even if we had some sales data from other shops we would have to make sure the data from both was collected the same way to make them comparable.

Statistics are a bitch. You cant prove anything with them to begin with. You are ONLY able to calculate how high (or low) the possibility is that differences or similarities to the total that you see in your sample size were created by chance.

Since we here only have 1 set of data we cant compare it to others thus making the data anecdotal.

Yes anecdotal.. but surely you can apply a collective experience and collate information from different sources to work out that WFB sells on nothing like the scale of 40k, and not surprised at all that it has fallen behind PP's games? I worked at GW (I saw sales figures, although this was many years ago now) and at an independent. You can see what sits on the shelves. A lot of people still play the game, but from what I've seen no-one spends £100+ on a massive block of infantry with character when they start a new force, they buy from ebay or use Mantic. If they buy anything, it's the massive monster/plastic kit.

I think GW have pushed themselves into a corner with regards to the game; they've made making massive infantry blocks favourable in the 8th edition rules, and no doubt thought that was a cunning plan combined with the price rise/reduced quantity of those models per box. Yet, this hasn't taken into account other manufacturers, ebay and of course 'unit filler' of dioramas and the like in those big 50-strong blocks (which you see more often than not these days).

xxvaderxx wrote:
Interesting, i dont think he should have separated Hordes and Warmashine, he should have just put them over 40k in 4th and add another title to the list, unlinke WHF and 40K this games are interchangeable, they can play "cross" game, i actually see them as different armies/flavors of the same game, even if some armies are more popular than others. This does not hold true for GW, you cant play your empire army against space marines.

Hey come on.. I've seen disembodied Blood Bowl troll torsos representing Blood Thirsters, and WFB movement trays as ork bikers. Anything is possible

Sales data from a single store is hard data, but being a small sample is unlikely to have good statistical validity and would probably not give a good co-efficient of correlation between sales and "Kickstarterness".

(Surprisingly small samples can be valid. Political surveys in nations of millions can be conducted on a few thousand people.)

Yes, but the samples have to be representative. 1 store is unlikely to be representative in the same way that one political district is unlikely to be representative.

However I don't see why so many people are arguing that it is silly to generalise from these rankings- neither the OP nor the poster of the rankings claims that that is the purpose of the rankings. I applaud the posting of this information and would find it interesting if more stores did this.

Certainly, the rankings I see match my own biases!

Confirmation bias can be a wonderful thing in moderation.

I'm often hesitant to post "top" lists because they do have limited utility. Whenever I do, I try to spin my own narrative around them, to at least add some value by sharing personal experience. There will be some (few) universal truths in that and a bunch of individualized experiences that don't correlate with others. My blog is mostly about the experience of running a game store, so I would encourage you take that as the context and not get hung up on data points.

As for Kickstarter, my experience and that of other store owners tends to be that KS does a very good job at market saturation, leaving a diminished market for stores to serve. That's a big generalization though. I've found that a KS project can be big enough to transcend this. My rule of thumb is I won't bring in a KS funded game into my store unless it hits a threshold, such as $50,000 in funding or 500 supporters. So my message to most small publishers is choose. You can either do Kickstarter OR you can do the game trade, unless you hit it big. It's nothing personal, store owners are just trying to understand viability of games in their stores.

Where it gets really scary is RPGs, where it seems an increasing percentage of new RPGs are using Kickstarter, not hitting my threshold, and from my perspective, disappearing into the ether. Our RPG section is somewhat stale and I think Kickstarter is a major reason. RPGs, from my perspective, might be hitting a Renaissance period using crowd funding, but it's going the way of chit and counter board games when it comes to my store, an area of grognardia that lost commercial viability decades ago.

Thanks for posting that article and thanks for posting here. Don't bother with posters who complain that it is not a global statistic which it is not pretending to be.

 Kilkrazy wrote:


Other interesting thing is that Kickstarter has failed to revitalise sales in traditional shops. That is because everyone who is really interested in the new game buys it through the Kickstarter, so 90% of the market is saturated straight away. The other 10% may be barely viable commercially.

That's total conjecture and actually, at Mantic's press conference, they indicated that pre-KS interest from distributors for Dreadball amounted to 5000 orders with an expected 60% sell-through (3000 sold with 2000 left in inventories). Then the KS happened, and over 3k were sent to backers and 7k sold out through distributors resulting in two complete production runs being sold out. KS drove the retail sales and distributors experienced a two-fold sell-through.

But then again, the only Mantic distributor in Germany I am aware of backed out last year, after all the kickstarters. Even Battlefield Berlin is very reluctant to stock Mantic.

Interesting (and good!) that FFG is doing so well in comparison to the others.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Interesting (and good!) that FFG is doing so well in comparison to the others.

Well, they do have tons of different titles. When you add them all up, of course it's going to show.

 Pacific wrote:
Y

I think GW have pushed themselves into a corner with regards to the game; they've made making massive infantry blocks favourable in the 8th edition rules, and no doubt thought that was a cunning plan combined with the price rise/reduced quantity of those models per box. Yet, this hasn't taken into account other manufacturers, ebay and of course 'unit filler' of dioramas and the like in those big 50-strong blocks (which you see more often than not these days).

This (large units) is generally true but starting to change. Some armies that are starting to dominate tournaments have a lower model count. WoC and OK both have low model counts and do very well. The Nurgle Epidemius list can get by with two blocks of about 30 PB. Buying 9 or 10 Beasts of Nurgle will break the bank though unless you proxy something cheaper. My lizardman army has about the same number of models in it as it did in 6th edition. My beastman army also has about the same number of models, just fewer units of infantry blocks.

It will be very interesting to see how 9th edition changes things up.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Interesting (and good!) that FFG is doing so well in comparison to the others.

I think It has somehting to do with the quality writers they have employed.

Regarding Mantic & Kickstarter the only product I've seen started to be carried in my local stores from Mantic is Dreadball. So I'd say there is a market for kickstarter stuff.

Also Dreamforge is being carried by a few stores locally too.

 Kilkrazy wrote:


(Surprisingly small samples can be valid. Political surveys in nations of millions can be conducted on a few thousand people.)

Yes, they can, but you'd have to randomize the data and it would have to be a valid representation for the entirety of sales in the US.