Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne looks at a couple of possible bad outcomes from recent successful Kickstarter campaigns.

Reaper's Kickstarter for their Bones line of miniatures looks like one of the most successful Kickstarters ever launched with over 17,000 backers pledging over $3.4 million (see "Reaper Kickstarter Raises $3.4 Million"). By my calculations, retailers who pledged $300 at the Undertaker level (that's 274 of us, in case you were counting) will get in excess of 400 miniatures. By my figures, that brings the cost per figure down to less than $1 a figure, making this a pretty good investment for those retailers who bought into the project.

While from a purely mercenary viewpoint, I am glad the project funded and look forward to getting boxes and boxes full of Bones, especially since the last time I checked, our suppliers were out of them. However, since Reaper set up the Bones Kickstarter to ramp up production of the Bones line, I doubt very much if we'll get any restock of the existing miniature line until the projected March release date. That means we miss the all-important Christmas season (on average, 40% of a retailers' sales occur during the last three months of the year) and Bones figures would have made great stocking stuffers. Oh well, I guess we will just have to sell customers pewter figures for Christmas.

I still have some concerns about Kickstarter. One is that more companies will look at the success of the Reaper campaign and last February's very successful drive by Giant in the Playground to reprint the Order of the Stick books and decide to rely on Kickstarter for funding as well. These two campaigns worked because they had products that people wanted (both Bones figures and the Order of the Stick books sell steadily) and the companies both added very nice incentives to their various levels and stretch goals, with GITP's incentives targeted towards the individual customer while Reaper's aimed at both customer and retailer. Each one had a number of levels, allowing funders quite a bit of flexibility in their investments, as well as encouraging funders to bump up pledges. Unless a company looking to fund through Kickstarter is willing to make the effort that these companies did and create excitement for their campaigns, they won't see the results that either company achieved. I fear we will see companies look at the results these two companies got, not look at the planning and execution they put into it, go ahead with a poorly planned Kickstarter campaign, and fail.

A second concern I have relates to what happened after Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 released under the OGL. The first OGL compatible books released after 3.0 hit the shelves sold like gangbusters. Seeing this, other companies rushed into the market with hundreds of books and modules. Some proved successful (Troll Lord, Mongoose and Paizo spring to mind) but dozens more did not and their poorly designed and received products glutted the market to the point where many customers (and retailers) avoided third party OGL products like the plague. This could easily happen with Kickstarter product campaigns as funders pledge to support a product that sounds really cool in concept, but when it arrives, it far underreaches expectations and soon, people avoid Kickstarter campaigns, only funding those companies with a proven track record, until the next cool concept comes along. I hope I am wrong but could see either of these outcomes easily occurring.

 frozenwastes wrote:
So neither of the concerns actually has anything to do with Reaper's kickstarter.