Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I don't care for the use of Kickstarter as pre-order service, one of many reasons I don't do any business with Mantic any longer.

That aside, other than speculation, we do not really know the financial situation of Privateer Press. Yeah, they're still in business, and releasing a lot of product, but are they making money hand over fist, scraping by, or somewhere in between?

It's easy for all the armchair CEO Dakka Know It Alls to criticize GW. As a publicly held company, their major financial data is a matter of public record. Not so for Privateer. Steve Jackson Games is one of the few private game companies I can think of that annually discuss financial and business matters/decisions in their annual report to stakeholders, most recent of which for 2015 was posted a few weeks ago. http://www.sjgames.com/general/stakeholders/ Company CEO Phil Reed was quite active in the forums discussing various questions, as well.

 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.

Based on their release and forget policy for games, I don't believe anything Mantic says about their post Kickstarter sales any more than something GW bloviates, like their 'best sellers' list. It's all gak without real numbers.

While not as many some, I can offer a bit of anecdotal evidence - only one store within a two hour drive of me carries any Mantic at all. And they stopped getting in anything more at the original Dreadball and Deadzone. It simply has no legs beyond the Kickstarter, and people are not beating down their doors asking for it.