insaniak wrote:

 the_Armyman wrote:
Let's be honest: KS is a preorder mechanic that allows large game companies to avoid the normal distribution channels, make a ton of money on a product upfront, and not risk a single dime of their own money.

If the end result is companies offering games that they otherwise might not choose to take the risk on, I don't have a problem with that.

 the_Armyman wrote:
So, a rhetorical question here: what if Games Workshop had started a KS for its new Specialist Games Studios and wanted to produce a board game? Would that have been okay, too?

 the_Armyman wrote:

TheAuldGrump wrote:
The reason that KS has been so successful is that traditional means of lending have become less effective - and distributors have been proving less willing to take risks on new lines, even from established companies.

A healthy company doesn't borrow money. A healthy company does market research and has some skin in the game. The more the gaming industry chooses to skip the B&M in favor of pure profit, the less healthy the entire business ecosystem becomes. It's short-sighted and I think we're already starting to see the damage at the street level.

 Polonius wrote:

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
For that matter, few people would argue that Reaper Miniatures wasn't, and isn't, a well established company, going much further back than PP.

Yet the Bones Kickstarters are immensely successful.

The Auld Grump

That's a great point, actually. I think I can distinguish them, but there is precedent for pretty established companies going to this particular well.

For me, the difference is that Reaper was developing molds that were pretty expensive. They likely could have gotten financing, and clearly were able to produce a few models on their own. The injection of capital allowed the range to explode. A board game is a pretty small ticket item compared to a range of metal molds.

There was also a lot of pent up demand for low cost, easy to paint minis. It was a completely new product, in a way that a board game simply can't be.

Honestly, I'm guessing the biggest difference is that Reaper made the kickstarters into amazingly good deals, in a way that I think is difficult with a board game due to lack of add ons and options.

 totalfailure wrote:

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
Even if Kickstarter were a 'loan' then I would still like game companies to use it.

I would rather see the companies paying the 'interest' to gamers than to the bank.

So, Bones III is from a well established company, for an increasingly well established line.

And it is worth it to me to 'loan' Pugh et ali a few hundred doallars, knowing that in the fullness of time, the 'interest' will come to me in the form of loverly unpainted plastics that I can spread on the floor and roll on, in orgiastic glee.

What was the question again?

The Auld Grump

Good for you. Some of us don't see the need to give interest free loans to established companies and assume all the risk of their pet project in exchange. While Kickstarter has produced has produced a few excellent gaming products, most of it has been run of the mill junk. If flooding the market with low quality junk was the mission, then Kickstarter has been a resounding success. There are only so many $$$s out there to give, and contrary to the bleatings of fanboys, the industry is not always better off when there is a flood of projects. Good ideas get lost in the all the blather of the Mantics and PPs hawking their next wave of low bidder produced Chinese junk.

It hurts, if not outright murders local game store sales, which everyone is always crying about, and does not build a community of gamers when all demand for a product is satisfied in a campaign. Then the product is DOA on a store shelf. And don't even get me started on the thieves that actually run Kickstarter, taking their cut, and shrugging their shoulders at outright fraud and abuse on their 'service'. Enjoy it while you can. The Robotechs and Up Fronts are going to bring an end to the Wild West era of Kickstarter.

 jonolikespie wrote:
A product sold through KS is only available for what, 3 weeks?

But KS means that product gets made and FLGSs everywhere are then able to stock it and sell it for years to come.

Were I to own a FLGS I'd think that seeing a successful KS means I should stock that product when it releases so I can capitalize on all those people who didn't manage to get the product via KS, but are now seeing the people who did enjoying it.

weeble1000 wrote:

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
So, no, if you want to point at who is 'murdering' the poor innocent gamestore, point at distributors and banks, as well as all of the people that buy online rather than go to their local store

You know I love you Grump, but just to be totally fair, that up there is part of the gripe some folks have with KS; it cuts out the FLGS. It is essentially buying online instead of in a brick and mortar store.

You can say that it is a product that wasn't available in the store anyways, but maybe those products would be in the stores if they hadn't been crowdfunded, maybe not.

Just pointing it out is all.

weeble1000 wrote:

 TheAuldGrump wrote:

weeble1000 wrote:

 TheAuldGrump wrote:
So, no, if you want to point at who is 'murdering' the poor innocent gamestore, point at distributors and banks, as well as all of the people that buy online rather than go to their local store

You know I love you Grump, but just to be totally fair, that up there is part of the gripe some folks have with KS; it cuts out the FLGS. It is essentially buying online instead of in a brick and mortar store.

You can say that it is a product that wasn't available in the store anyways, but maybe those products would be in the stores if they hadn't been crowdfunded, maybe not.

Just pointing it out is all.

I would be willing to bet that 75% of those folks buying through Kickstarter would not have been buying from the FLGS in any event - so, that is largely a false gripe.

Kickstarter is contesting more with the online games market than with the brick and mortar shops.

The Auld Grump

I don't know that it is fair to say that. It would be fair enough to say that products that are entirely unavailable to a brick and mortar shop don't compete with a brick and mortar shop, but that is also a false dichotomy.

At the end of the day, people have a hobby budget. Companies, such as Red Box Games among many others, are specifically going to Kickstarter because even their webstores have experienced a significant drop in sales. I can't tell you how often I have heard that my own company should go to Kickstarter in order to compete effectively. That is the prevailing perception, and it is a perception we are complicit in creating.

As I have heard from lots of producers, the money is on Kickstarter. Lots of producers feel like they have to go there in order to compete effectively, not because of the advertising benefits, but because their typical customers are spending their money backing Kickstarter campaigns. We are becoming conditioned to Kickstarter campaigns, and we are becoming conditioned as to what to expect from those campaigns, which is both good and bad.

It would be disingenuous to say that these sorts of buying habits, in the aggregate, have no impact on the types of products that we have seen, and will see in the future. And it would be equally disingenuous to say that these buying habits have no impact on the ways in which products are offered for sale in this market.

We are seeing a Kickstarted board game from Privateer Press because we have helped create a value proposition for that type of product delivered in that manner.

If you asked me, I would say PP isn't going to Kickstarter because it wants customers to take on the risk. I would say that PP is going to Kickstarter because that is where people are spending their money, so if you want that money, you have to compete in that space, with a product tailored to compete 'well' in that space, i.e. a self-contained CMoN style board game with a splashy campaign and all the Kickstarter bells and whistles.

As I said, Kickstarter, for both good and ill, is changing the way we learn about, purchase, and experience table top games products. We can't hand wave the impact of those changes. The fact that people are spending their money on Kickstarter means that they are less likely to spend that money in the FLGS. That's not a great leap of logic to make. It also means that they are less likely to spend their money on ecommerce sites.

I do it all the time. If I throw $200 into a Kickstarter campaign one month, I'm not buying a slew of new 4Ground terrain, and I'm much less likely to grab a blister off the rack for the lols at the FLGS. Was I going to spend that $200 at the FLGS? We'll never know, because I didn't. It got spent on a Kickstarter campaign so it wasn't even in my pocket when I went down to the shop.

 insaniak wrote:

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
MY problem with KS is the fact that it takes the risk away from companies and puts it on the customer.

That's not entirely true. We've seen any number of companies suffer considerably (and in some cases fold entirely) as a result of unexpected issues once it came time to actually produce the Kickstarter product.

It certainly passes a share of the risk to the 'customer'... but a certain amount of risk is still there for the company. How much depends largely on just how well planned out the Kickstarter was... although a better planned Kickstarter is generally going to result in less risk to the customer as well, so ultimately everyone wins.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Talys wrote:
I think you misunderstand -- just don't keep anything on the shelf, and essentially turn the Privateer Press part of the business into a discount mail-order desk, with the exception of stuff like hobby tools and paints, that are supplies which will move. The only items I was suggesting to leave on the shelf was the stuff he already had that didn't survive the fire sale Brick & Mortar stores can undersell online stores (or at least be competitive) because the marginal cost of the special order item is zero -- they're ordering from the distributor for other stuff anyhow. So even if you're only making $2 on a blister, well, it was $2 more than you were going to make. It's literally zero risk, because you make all the people who aren't regulars prepay for everything (the trade-off for a nice discount).

This only works, though, if your customers are actually willing to order what you don't have on the shelf. Many are not.

If I walk into your store and you don't have what I'm looking for, I'm not going to stuff around placing an order for something that I'm going to have to make a separate trip back to collect. I'm just going to get what I want somewhere else that does have it... and then next time I want something, chances are I'm going back to the place that had what I wanted, rather than to your store.

 Talys wrote:

 insaniak wrote:

This only works, though, if your customers are actually willing to order what you don't have on the shelf. Many are not.

If I walk into your store and you don't have what I'm looking for, I'm not going to stuff around placing an order for something that I'm going to have to make a separate trip back to collect. I'm just going to get what I want somewhere else that does have it... and then next time I want something, chances are I'm going back to the place that had what I wanted, rather than to your store.

Yes, you're right. You'll lose a lot of sales by trying to sell from an empty wagon: no argument there. Ultimately, if you do this with everything, I suspect your business would fail.

However, what I was saying is that it makes no sense to tell your customers, "I'm not going to sell Privateer Press anymore." -- because it costs you nothing to tell the same customers, "I'm not going to stock Privateer Press anymore, but I'll order it in for you for the best price in town any time you want." Even if you only make 5% on the sale, it's 5% you otherwise wouldn't have made. Just as importantly, it prevents some of your customers from hopping over to Joe's Wargaming down the road -- where he'll end up buying non-PP stuff too. Or just maybe Mr. Cheap will come and buy the expensive $100 PP model from you because you have the best price, and then in the future, buy something else from you.

Remember the context -- the fellow's PP sales were really low (1 turn annually). So he either figures out how to improve his PP sales, or he has to stock less (or not at all). But why not pick up free special orders?

 Talys wrote:
Sure thing -- I understand that. If I walk into a place that offers great prices on something I like, but the store manager is incredibly negative about it, I'd say screw the prices, I'll go somewhere more welcoming

Bringing it back on topic, it's not hard to imagine, in my mind store owners that have a less favorable opinion of vendors that launch via KS rather than through a channel they can profit from, and that may be a reason to have a poor general attitude towards a company.

Though of course this has nothing really to do with PP historically, or the one store we're specifically chatting about (the video game doesn't count, because it's not like that deprived stores of any potential sales), it might apply to other companies that get their products out via kickstarter, and that general attitude may sour the store's sales of that product.