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 jaymz wrote:
I do have to wonder.....the concept of crowd =funding was to give the little guy the ability to do something they could not do via traditional means....so at what point is it just not ethical to keep doing kickstarters when you have shown yourself to be quite successful and likely capable of going a more traditional route? Seems to me that the more you use the CF method the less likely you will have customers at retail which seems...silly but a realistic outcome as more and more would go thru KS to get the better deal.

I mean what is the point if only a few thousand people end up with your product spread worldwide? Wouldn't the goal to be successful at normal retail and become self sustaining?

To elaborate a bit more on JHDD's points, I'm not sure "ethics" ever enters into the equation for private businesses. If GW, for example, did a crowd-funding campaign for plastic Sisters of Battle (self-hosted of course; they don't share money) people might cry foul since GW is a publicly traded company with actual investors to provide capital. However, as a gauge of interest to confirm that they're not putting said investors money at risk to develop that range it's an excellent data collection mechanism so it's not unethical so much as tacky.

Where I think most KS projects run aground on the after-project success is how incredibly small the crowdfunding community really is; it's a niche within a niche. Look at the massive success of KD:M 1.5, it still "only" had 20k backers and that was the high-water mark of gaming kickstarters to-date. Even with their slowdowns I'm thinking that's likely what GW expects each SM kit they produce to shift with ease though obviously GW doesn't disclose such numbers. There's a big disparity there, largely caused by GW having a retail presence already. Most companies do not have that, don't have the distribution channels and don't have the framework in place to build it.

I think the question becomes what is the intent of the creator. The aforementioned KD:M has little-to-no interest in retail. It is very much a passion project of the creator that would never get made otherwise; the content and scope of it is just beyond what any traditional publisher would have taken on (and likely remains so even with the established strength of the brand). If a creator intends to go to retail then as John said they ideally just want to break-even on KS which leaves them with the capital investments complete if there's a demand at retail. Absent a distribution chain like Reaper's though, that's going to fail to pan out long-term more often than not, and it presumes the creator has their own funds to cover the retail run; even if substantially cheaper in comparison it's not "free" if you have another 20+ models to go. Trying to get project+retail stock out of a KS seems a likely point of overreach, which with hindsight for RRT seems to be borne out.

For most companies KS can become a vicious circle, especially if they are not a production/distribution house themselves. It will see many cool projects made, but the path to being able to not need KS at all is not something that seems particularly likely. It's like an addicting drug; some people on it seem to be able to be reasonably functional (CMON), some people occasionally fall apart (Mantic springs to mind, but many others), and some end up in an alley rooting through garbage trying to find enough metal cans for their next fix (PB...).

 John Prins wrote:

Morgan Vening wrote:
Actually, I know at least one backer did (Azazelx?). The reason why more people weren't able to, wasn't because the risks were there, it was because of the timeframes involved. Most credit cards have a limit that is easily surpassed by Kickstarter timelines. I remember when it all went pear shaped for RRT, and most cards were found to have a 90 or 180 day policy. So it's not about risk, as much as it's about the bureaucracy of the banking industry.

That's actually very interesting. It almost might be worth getting a credit card with long-term policies just for Kickstarter backing. When Ninja Division "pulled out" of the RTT, that would have been the ideal time to bail, though we didn't really know how badly Palladium would bungle it.

Actually, I almost wonder if a CC company could make a viable model of "insuring" your crowdfunding pledges so long as a balance equal to the pledge amount is kept on the card and the project is past their estimated delivery date and evidence of non-delivery is provided. A mildly higher interest rate combined with the long windows of most crowdfunding campaigns have would likely rack up a decent amount of income, and then if they had some mechanism with KS to transfer ownership of the pledge/standing that would give the CC larger and larger dollar amounts to go after a bad creator if it was warranted. Few backers would go to the mat for a few hundred dollars, but a CC company could almost write off legal fees as advertising for the card and its "protections" while KS acquires a sort-of enforcement arm without having to do anything (their preferred model); I imagine a fair few RTT would love such a card to get their outstanding funds back AND watch PB twist in court.

I doubt it'd catch on, but it does make you wonder.

EDIT: Look Ma! I'm the top of page 300! And people said I'd never accomplish anything...

Merijeek wrote:
Kevin has sued a lot of people (and you can tell from looking at Palladium Books's stunning success that it's a winning long term strategy) - can you be more specific?

I assume based on Google they mean Peter Adkison who owns Gen Con, LLC and was formerly at Wizards of the Coast who was sued by Palladium.

Info from: https://www.rpg.net/columns/briefhistory/briefhistory1.phtml

 John Prins wrote:

Merijeek wrote:
New update. Holy feth what a weasel.

I begin to see some of the problem when Palladium has to send NDAs to manufacturers before they even get quotes.

Well, they don't want to put in the work of developing the idea for a product line, putting tons of effort into making sensible designs that could be made fairly quickly and then show it to a company and have that company decline and turn around and make an eerily-similar but slightly more knock-off-ish product based on the demand illustrated for the initial effort. Certainly they don't want someone to run a crowdfunding campaign for said idea and raise...let's say $1.44M on over-promising things and then putter about for the next half a decade when the original idea likely would have been much faster and better quality.

I mean, sure, it's unlikely that such a thing would happen to this franchise *cough*again*cough*, but PB loves you guys too much to take such risks.

 JohnHwangDD wrote:
I could understand producing 10,000 units given 5,300 unit backer demand. But 17,500? That's delusional. Oh, wait...

Not to completely defend PB, but in a world where Forar exists, 10k units isn't unreasonable. Likely quite a few people ordered 2+ core sets, and Forar's cult had I believe 8 boxes on 1 backer? So, 8-9k could have actually been needed for the backers, because of the bizarre things Canadians get up to in the winter.

Of course, 17k would be delusional IF you understood that KickStarters magnify the apparent demand in a niche and you can't equate number of backers to number of traditional pre-orders. PB likely was wholly unaware of this and plugged the number into their "pre-order calculator" (or abacus...) and thought they'd be shifting tons like with a regular product offering. Sadly for the backers, reality is that most of the initial demand was satisfied by the KS itself, and any residual demand was likely easily satisfied by disaffected backers and/or stores unloading the product. I don't think that's really a-typical of most KS projects that the after-campaign demand is less than that of the campaign by a wide margin, some notable exceptions aside. Also this campaign was so long ago I'm not sure that factor was as widely understood as it is today. Four years is a lot of time to gain perspective as anyone who had a child when the campaign ended can tell you. Such a child will be starting school soon!

So, still PB not knowing what the feth they're doing, but a different flavor than it might seem at first.

On the list of shenanigans, the GenCon "vote" (non-responses would be counted as "It's fine to sell at GenCon") and the "the first containers were nothing but Core boxes" meaning that very few KS pledges could have possibly been processed out of that initial supply (the "sweet spot" pledge level had extras not in the Core) seem worth calling out still. Despite their promises, they were clearly hell-bent on selling things, likely for near-retail prices, at GenCon.

It does beg the odd thought though. If PB had managed to not enrage karma, would those sales have 1) sold through some of their (over)stock and 2) actually generated a small bit of buzz to move more of it and make it less of an insanely stupid maneuver to have ordered so much? Kind of moot now since the horse is out of the barn, but it beats the nothing that PB delivers to talk about.

 warboss wrote:
Isn't Adepticon *AFTER* their cutoff for selling Robotech related items of March 20th? Unless Wayne brings his hundreds to thousands of "personal" copies to sell, I don't see how they could do so assuming they treat their contractual obligations with Harmony Gold with a modicum of respect unlike the 5,000+ kickstarter contracts they just reneged on.

That's the date backers have to get their requests in by, not necessarily the date they have to stop selling Robotech. Presuming it expires at the end of March, that date would give them a couple days to make sure they hold back enough stock to fulfill the requests of the backers who take an exchange rather than demanding a refund and then take as much as they can cram into a vehicle to Adepticon.

However, that would show an ability to think ahead and plan, and those haven't been hallmarks of PB's behavior to date.

 Stormonu wrote:

@techsoldaten - Huh, I thought a debtor's prison situation was illegal in the US.

To my (limited) understanding, it's a quirk of the law that debtor's prisons are indeed illegal but it's possible to be put in jail for defying a court order to repay the loan after a judgement against you. You're not being jailed for the debt; you're being jailed due to contempt of court for not following the court's order to pay the debt. This is viewed by the ACLU, among others, as a distinction that means little to the affected, but the law is pretty much all about those little technicalities.

Of course, I don't think the practice of jailing people is terribly commonplace so much as one obviously so prone to abuse, especially in localities with elected judges and lobbying money from creditors, that it's viewed as fairly egregious that it's even possible.

Back on topic, while I wouldn't want to see employees of PB out on the street, I also would prefer that PB ceases operations with its assets liquidated and the principal parties of PB who had the biggest hand in lying-through-omission not have a job in the gaming industry anymore. Hopefully at least some of that comes to pass as a warning for future shysters looking to take advantage of people.

 techsoldaten wrote:

 ScarletRose wrote:
"made some mistakes"? That's quite a downplay, it's more like knowingly squandered money, concealed the facts from the backers whose money it was and then tried a really obvious scheme to get the same backers to waive their legal rights.

But hey, if we went after fraudsters there totally wouldn't be any businesses right? It's no wonder financial crime is so rife in the world.

I was saying calls to tar and feather him are not constructive. If the point is for backers to get some of their value back / satisfaction of driving PB out of business, this would likely have the opposite effect.

Nothing I've read suggests any kind of fraud occurred, but I haven't really dived in too deep. Is there anything specific you can point me to?

There's the arguable, but not clear-cut, case of them claiming that Wave 2 was going to be produced when by their recent admission they knew they wouldn't have the funds to do so literal years ago. In court it would likely be sufficient to prove they were trying to secure the funding by other means to stave off the failure, if they can produce credible documentation to that effect. However, the question of how the project funds were suddenly insufficient would come up which could lead to uncomfortable answers from PB (i.e. - overbuying retail using KS funds without leaving sufficient funds for completion) which may drift it into a grayer area that most people would care to be in normally.

More relevant is the repeated statements that they would offer refunds if the project could not deliver rewards as a response to people requesting them and thus as their reason for not returning the funds. They do not appear to be honoring that repeated statement, which they acknowledged was something they had agreed to do under the KS agreement. If they continue to not refund money, that does on the surface appear to make their earlier statements, which were made when some funds could likely have been recouped more readily, fraudulent. They said if X happened, they would do Y as required. X happened and while there's still time for them to do Y there's been no mention of it being an option. To then offer refunds if you didn't take their earlier option also seems like it'd fall afoul of aspects of that, as perhaps backers who did take up the stock offer would have preferred refunds if it had been mentioned. So it seems likely they have no intention of doing refunds, which is them keeping people's money when they said they would return it which, to my layman's interpretation, would be deception.

Morgan Vening wrote:

Koltoroc wrote:
Morgan, About the pledge manager fees, yeah, those are probably the only likely honest numbers here.

Backerkit has currently 3 different plans, the "essentials" plan is 2% of the campaign funds + 5% of the backerkit funds with 199$ setup fees, the "professional" plan is 3% of the campaign funds with 199$ setup fees, for the third you have to contact them.

https://www.backerkit.com/plans

I have no idea what the fees were back then, but considering what they are now, 2% is totally possible.

Other than that, yeah, none of the numbers add up to anything resembling sensible.

That just seems ridiculous! Having a fixed fee based on the complexity of service, and a portion of the money raised in the backerkit (as they have to do the processing) is reasonable. But 2% of the Kickstarter take as well? That's just obscene.

If PB's backers had added those funds during the campaign instead of the Pledge Manager, it'd mean PB would have lost money on the Pledge Manager.

I guess that's one of the reasons I'm not rich. Exploitation rackets are not my thing. That if both PB and DreamPod9 used the same pledge manager, PB would have paid $29,000, and DP9 $3,200, for the same service, plus a percentage of sales fees it has to process. At least with Kickstarter, Kickstarter has to host all the failures. But Backerkit by it's very nature, only has to deal with successive Kickstarters. I just don't get it.

Likely someone sat down to figure out the costs associated with running the infrastructure and making sure it works and realized it would be in excess of what they would have to pay here, especially as most KS projects are not run by companies with the spare capital to employ an IT department and "entry-level" IT folks are around 40k/year in costs. You could make an argument you wouldn't need them for an entire year, but you also don't want "entry-level" people doing it so the lower-time and higher-skill/experience curves will likely even out to around the same overall cost.

That need for greater expertise is down to the fact pledge managers are *critical* to fulfillment of a project. If the interface is clunky or unclear that's a lot of support hours consumed helping people tell you why they gave you money (and most projects at a large scale are not creator-only, so those support people answering questions will need to be paid). Improper management can also cause enormous problems, as I suspect Hawk Wargames and Mantic both were bitten by database errors at different points where a fraction of pledges disappeared from view. This obviously has disastrous follow-ons in terms of ordering and fulfillment to discover you have X dozens of orders that weren't part of the plan nor stock order, to say nothing of the justified anger of backers that they did their part and now are waiting even longer.

So yeah, the sticker price can look a bit shocking, but compared to the cost and risks of doing it yourself and botching things it doesn't sound particularly egregious for the likely effort involved. If it was, there'd be other companies doing the same thing for less; competition and all that.

I await PB claiming that the excess stock was in case they overlooked their entire backer population on fullfillment, with a few for packages getting lost...just in case. It seems like the type of ham-fisted excuse they'd attempt to employ anyway.

Autarch wrote:
I don't recall what happened with SDE, but there are a number of RRT backers that hold ND equally responsible for this Kickstarter's failure (I am not one). I'm also not familiar with any of ND's recent kickstarters. Has their been any toxicity drifting over to them from Tactics, like there was for Academy or gRifts?

As Albertorius points out, ND's major ill-will is their most recent SDE campaign where I do not believe they have delivered anything to backers and just posted an update tantamount to "nothing has been produced yet, we have to go with another factory" for a project that's already a year late. Their Forgotten King campaign for SDE ran as close to clockwork as most KS campaigns get so I'm not sure what screw-ups befell them here, but clearly they were many and significant. I was a bit overextended on funds at the time of the campaign so I didn't back it as I had the previous one, but I don't recall it being an issue on Forgotten King when the whole Robotech association was much stronger.

There might be some renewed anger with the official closure of RTT, but it probably pales to the anger they've engendered on their own.

Also, I add my (non-counting) vote to Forar doing the opening introduction for any new thread. Adds almost a bit of Shakespearean flair to the proceedings as though we're all in fair Verona...

 Talizvar wrote:

I am curious where we will see the RRT sale next?
I feel a curious feeling of leniency for a liquidator getting my money who already bought the stuff: the money transaction already occured, no royalty kickbacks being handed out.

An interesting question; Miniature Market seems to be a common destination for such things, but since they likely just got rid of their cores how likely would they be to want to pick up more. At the same time, at liquidation prices they might be able to move some with the "look at the crazy savings versus retail (that nobody with much sense would have ever paid)!" style of promotion.

I guess it boils down to what the hypothetical liquidation price ends up being. While I'd imagine most vendors have already been burned by how slow-moving most of the stock is on the shelf, for a low-enough price it might be worth taking on. Morbid curiosity and a sufficiently low price might actually get me to buy a core. Pretty sure I have some room on the shelf next to Dreadfleet...

 Talizvar wrote:

Happily, I have been practicing up on character models for 40k and my son has got into Gundam models.
I now have "leveled up" and may have better skills for doing those tiny panel lines on the VT's.
They were looking pretty bad for my initial work but is a bit better now.

A few options are:

I'll toss this one out there: archival ink pens (not sure if these are the same as Gundam pens though). With the black ink ones I have, they're initially very dark when applied, but that would likely pair very well with a cel-shaded painting style like one would go for on anime models; I'm personally expecting the matte varnish I use to temper that nicely on the "realistic" models. I've been using them on my FoW/TY tanks for doing the panel lines and they're dramatically faster than inks, and much easier to control because...well, they're pens and not as runny as a sufficient amount of ink to darken some shades of paint. Doesn't mean they can't be farked up (since I've managed it many times), but the results have been much more consistent than using washes. YMMV depending on what you're looking to get, but they're not horrendously expensive and can be found in art supply stores as well as the usual online retailers. Haven't looked at the panel lines on a RRT mini to see, but the lines on a 15mm tank aren't particularly huge either.

Something to look into at any rate; even if it's not for you at least you had the option to review it.