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 AlexHolker wrote:

 Guildsman wrote:

This is possibly the most worrisome idea that's come along so far. What happens when TGG gets to retail? Will there be a market for it?

I don't think there will be. There's no foundation on which to build an army - you start with $43 for 10 guardswoman-equivalents and it rises from there, and there's no cheap alternative that won't look terribly out of place. Some people will pay that much for guardsmen, like Forgeworld's Elysians, but they're also the ones who have already dropped $500 during the Kickstarter.

You're still missing a pretty fundamental point on these, Alex. RH figures aren't a "cheap alternative" to GW (that's Mantic's Corporation, or many other ranges through the years). They're comparably-priced "boutique" figures. They might be an alternative, but they're not a "cheap" alternative, nor are they meant to be. In this way - though very different stylistically - they are similar to Vic's stuff. Characterful, well-sculpted alternatives to Imperial Guard.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Kroothawk wrote:
Then read again the quote I responded to.

Yeah, PsychoticStorm's post doesn't state or imply that. he says he thinks it could have done a lot better. His post is quite critical of the campaign, but at worst he's saying that it was "okay" (which I disagree with) but even that is a far cry from "supreme failure".

He said that only the end result could be called a success. That obviously excluded the 200,000$ in the first 2 hours.

Yeah, again I'm not reading that even being implied in his post.

You could actually argue that the $200k result from the first two hours had nothing to do with the way the KS was actually run, and was instead a result of a combination of their pre-KS advertising, 6-month delay which made sure everyone knew and watching for it and reputation for quality. I say this because at that point they just had to open the gates and $200k of us all flooded in.

Kroot, imo you're arguing against a strawman. As Azazel says, I don't see implied what you do, and are responding to.

The data is interesting, let's stick to discussing that?

Imo, 200K start and 100K finish is the key stat. My take, like Buzzsaw's, is that's due to Great buildup, but some fumbles in how the campaign was run. It's interesting, regardless, and there are some great things to learn from it.

But continuing to argue against things people aren't saying is not making your point very well. Everyone I've seen things the start was fantastic. It's the graph after that that may have some lessons for future campaigns. It still did well, but the point of analyzing it is to learn what worked best (pre-KS buildup!) and what could be have been better, as compared to the data we have (other campaign graphs).

For example, you continually state the 100K finish was a boost. It was! But who thinks it isn't? Rather, was it as big a boost as other campaigns got? The graphs show that definitively No, it was not.

Therefore, an objective person likely would copy RH's pre-KS buildup, but try to learn from their during the campaign mistakes. It can be successful, and be learned from, at the same time

There is a finite market for female SF soldier models and the offer may have captured most of it early on, thanks to the advance publicity.

Maybe, but I am not sure that's all there is to female SF soldiers market, I feel there is lots of potential left untapped.

Even if there was a finite market, a good company would find ways to expand it.

A really good company would find ways to expand their offerings to eliminate all competition in all industries throughout the entire world.

I think the biggest and best take away from this kickstarter campaign is that after a thread in Nuts and Bolts, Ouze went and created his own kickstarter for Flying Assault Butts, and never was the world the same.

 Azazelx wrote:

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Guildsman wrote:

This is possibly the most worrisome idea that's come along so far. What happens when TGG gets to retail? Will there be a market for it?

I don't think there will be. There's no foundation on which to build an army - you start with $43 for 10 guardswoman-equivalents and it rises from there, and there's no cheap alternative that won't look terribly out of place. Some people will pay that much for guardsmen, like Forgeworld's Elysians, but they're also the ones who have already dropped $500 during the Kickstarter.

You're still missing a pretty fundamental point on these, Alex. RH figures aren't a "cheap alternative" to GW (that's Mantic's Corporation, or many other ranges through the years).

I didn't say Raging Heroes was a "cheap alternative" to GW, I said there was no cheap alternative to Raging Heroes to provide bulk to an army. Unless you are willing to pay $4.30 for a 5 point model, you need something other than Raging Heroes' restics to make up the numbers.

They're comparably-priced "boutique" figures.

They are not comparatively priced.

At RRP they start at $21.50 for five, while Imperial Guard start at 18 pounds for 10. ($4.30 vs. ~$2.90)
At discount they start at $15 for five, while Imperial Guard start at 11.63 pounds for 10. ($3.00 vs. ~$1.90)

 Kilkrazy wrote:
There is a finite market for female SF soldier models and the offer may have captured most of it early on, thanks to the advance publicity.

This is probably one of the more difficult possible problems, but simply put, I don't give much credence to it*. I (shockingly) prefer my own thesis that they exhausted the market that was interested in their offerings at that price and set of offerings.

Frankly, the notion that there are only ~2750 people interested in female infantry in the world seems... difficult to countenance. Considering, especially, that KD:M had very nearly twice that number of backers (~5400) and was a campaign that is certainly associated in the popular imagination with female miniatures of various types. Can it really be that in a marketplace where Reaper pulls in nearly 18k backers, only about 1/6 of those people are interested in female miniatures?

Now, it's fair to say that no other campaign covered exactly the same ground, but that is begging the question: Why did their market cap out so low?**

 PsychoticStorm wrote:
Maybe, but I am not sure that's all there is to female SF soldiers market, I feel there is lots of potential left untapped.

Even if there was a finite market, a good company would find ways to expand it.

To my mind, and this is going outside the realm of this analysis so I won't labor long on it, is I have serious doubts about any plans to launch a line or game where the mass infantry are anything but hard plastic. Spin-cast resin or restic or trollcast or whatever may be very nice for details or whatever, but the expense!

Consider, it can only be hoped that now that wave 2 of DFG's offerings are (slowly) getting ready to hit American shores, DFG's female "Black Widow" infantry is one step closer to fruition. We don't yet know what the retail pricing will be for them, but assuming they will be in-line with the Eisenkern stormtroopers, they will presumably be around 10 for $20-25 and 20 for ~$45 (considerably less in practice).

Now, RH's lines will have more "flavor" it can be argued (or not, we have seen little on the Widows), but the simple fact is that whatever virtues they will have, RH's troop boxes will be twice the price.







*In a practical sense, obviously all elements of the physical universe are finite, but not in the context we're talking about.

**Which, in fairness, is... kinda the whole point of this exegesis.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Trasvi wrote:

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Kroothawk wrote:
Yeah, obviously I deny the obvious fact that 200,000$ raised in the first 2 hours is a sign of supreme failure. Only a blind fanboy could spin these 200,000$ to another sign of success, right?

The initial burst was a success of the pre-Kickstarter buildup, not the Kickstarter itself. It happened before they posted a single update.

I think what Kroot is getting at, and maybe being missed in the OP, is that in a way maybe this number of backers was all the kickstarter was going to have.

Lets say there were 2500 people who would have backed this kickstarter.
The 'typical' gaming Kickstarter debuts on the website, perhaps with a few days pre-warning on their own website. In 12 hours or so someone on DakkaDakka picks up on it, starts a thread. In 72 hours, you have 250 backers. Then it chugs along for 3 weeks, gaining another 1000 backers; and in the last 72 hours, it gains 1250 backers from all those fence-sitters who wanted to see how good things would be at the very end.

TGG instead had a 4 month advertising campaign. The effect of this campaign was to *shift* people from the middle-3-weeks and last-72-hours group to the first-72-hours group. People knew about the campaign before it started, the didn't hear about it on DakkaDakka after 2 days were already done.


That's just a theory. Perhaps the advertising campaign didn't bring in any more backers, it just changed the time at which those backers made their pledges by making them aware earlier. I'm not saying the campaign was perfectly or badly run, just that this could be a possibility.

Perhaps another part is that the campaign was running shortly after many people looking at alternative 40k models were reeling from their Deadzone pledges?

This is a longer version of the quote by KK I responded to above, and I should reiterate that it is indeed a valid argument (though Kroot's formulation is... yeah...): the problem is that I really don't think there is evidence to show market capture of the type being alleged.

I think it's more reasonable that there are people that are interested in female miniatures, just not at that price, or terms, or whatever.

Put another way, I think it's about the psychology of selling, not an inherently tiny market. Especially given that TGG (unlike the vast majority of such projects) contained multiple aesthetic lines, it should have the broadest capture of any campaign, not the smallest.

The psychology of selling is a huge deal. Huge. It's why a KS like MYTH absolutely exploded in the final two days. The campaign had become, for lack of a better phrase, "too good to miss," very much like the Reaper Bones KS. And when it came to that psychology of selling, RH did a few things, IMO, very wrong:

1. They became abrasive. The attitude displayed in the update regarding no longer showing any renders to the customer base was the last straw for me, and I think, for many others. Now, if they wanted to keep renders, etc, on the DL, that's one thing, but to vocalize it...just a bad move.

2. The campaign was dishonest. People have touched on it before in this thread, but none of the stretch goals seemed "genuine." I realize that statement is about as ambiguous as they come, but especially at the outset when they blew past a bunch right away. They, and quite frankly ANY KS, should have their first 10 or so stretches (especially if they're going to do them in such small increments) listed right away. I think being honest is a big deal with these projects, and they simply didn't appear to be that forthcoming.

3. For "4 Months of Planning," they were unprepared For me, this was a killer. I think you owe it to your customers to be well prepared. For a project that was delayed for months, and for one that they claimed they were well prepared for, they were grossly unprepared. Based on other high quality miniatures projects, they should have been able to project to at least $500k in funding. If they hit that point and then said, "Hey ya'll, we need a few days for more stretches because $500k is what we planned for" then fine. But then again, that would require the project to be honest.

@Kroot - It seems like you're intentionally obtuse on here quite a bit. Am I imagining things?

The above is pretty much spot on for why I pulled my early bird pledge and never even went back in for a single model/box like I was considering.

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:

 AlexHolker wrote:

 Guildsman wrote:

This is possibly the most worrisome idea that's come along so far. What happens when TGG gets to retail? Will there be a market for it?

I don't think there will be. There's no foundation on which to build an army - you start with $43 for 10 guardswoman-equivalents and it rises from there, and there's no cheap alternative that won't look terribly out of place. Some people will pay that much for guardsmen, like Forgeworld's Elysians, but they're also the ones who have already dropped $500 during the Kickstarter.

You're still missing a pretty fundamental point on these, Alex. RH figures aren't a "cheap alternative" to GW (that's Mantic's Corporation, or many other ranges through the years).

I didn't say Raging Heroes was a "cheap alternative" to GW, I said there was no cheap alternative to Raging Heroes to provide bulk to an army. Unless you are willing to pay $4.30 for a 5 point model, you need something other than Raging Heroes' restics to make up the numbers.

They're comparably-priced "boutique" figures.

They are not comparatively priced.

At RRP they start at $21.50 for five, while Imperial Guard start at 18 pounds for 10. ($4.30 vs. ~$2.90)
At discount they start at $15 for five, while Imperial Guard start at 11.63 pounds for 10. ($3.00 vs. ~$1.90)

Alex. I know you just want cheap R&F. You made that abundantly clear previously. The point that I've made several times now in both threads is that RH are not a source of cheap R&F nor are they ever going to be. These are clearly not the droids you're looking for. These are not designed to compare directly to the decent-but-not-outstanding Cadian Plastics released over a decade ago. They have the same in-game use, but they are not in competition as they fulfil different aesthetic roles. Your constant use of UK prices and best-outcome UK discounts (without factoring in shipping) as though they were actual options for you or I is somewhat dishonest as well.

I'm sure there's still plenty of people in the potential market for these figures. It's not like everyone who has the potential to be interested in something like this is willing to drop $500+ on concept-art product with unseen renders in an unknown material a year in advance. People paying for Forge World Elysians or DKOK, or Vic Minis figures and so forth have the option to get the figures they've paid for shipped immediately. To suggest that the full market for a figure range is tapped before it's even released is just silly.

 Redbeard wrote:

 Guildsman wrote:
What really turned me off of the campaign, and what I believe directly and indirectly caused a lot of the ill will amongst the community was the obvious manipulation of stretch goal amounts. Now, I understand that every campaign decides what is an acceptable amount to ask for the next stretch goal based on a variety of factors, including what they feel they can get away with. However, seeing it play out in full view in front of me just seemed dishonest. Shifting the stretch amount between $10k, $20k, and $30k so many times made us question the value of the figures, leading to a lot of the "pledge value" foolishness, which RH made worse by their awful communication.

This is exactly my issue with the campaign too. It seemed to me like they had planned to unlock minis at a level comparable to what other mini KS's did, where a new sculpt would be unlocked every $5-10k. And then they blew the roof off the goal before they had put that down, in such a way that all subsequent unlocking just seemed haphazard.
- snip -
Now, it strikes me as really odd that a company that was so small that they were asking a customer to fix their mistake would then just drop that request. It just screams really bad organizational skills.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
I see a potential trap: the problem of proportions. When the models finally arrive, they will be either A) truescale or b) heroic.
- snip -
In either case, you are likely going to see a lot of negativity and gnashing of teeth when the models hit the streets. Throw in a delay or two, and you have a Sedition Wars situation, where all most potential customers hear about your product is that it was disappointing in some way.

Guildsman, Redbeard, Bob, and Cincy (in his post) all raise good points. I can particularly relate to all of them as well since they're the main concerns which, along with anticipation of the Not-Sororitas KS, made me decide not to invest in this TGG campaign.

I'm curious not so much about Raging Heroes first Kickstarter campaign - that's over and done with and the analysis in this thread (thank you Buzzsaw) feels like a good breakdown of that endeavor - but more curious with their subsequent campaigns. They still have two more, I believe, in the works: The Dark Elf Invasion and The Sisters of Eternal Mercy.

With what's been discussed here and, hopefully, Raging Heroes own analysis will we see significant and notable changes to either of those future Kickstarters?

It's been stated the large success of the initial pledging towards TGG was in no small part due to the long buildup before officially launching. Keep in mind, then, that Dark Elves and Sisters of Eternal Mercy will have even more lead time. The potential for a big launch like TGG is just as good if not better. This applies especially to the Sisters which have, I feel, and enormous opportunity to capitalize on the opening left by Games Workshop and their SoB neglect. However, the (mis)managing of a campaign can squander such opportunities by failing to maximize interest or actively promoting disinterest. In other words, if it's not managed right then not all of the potential will be realized and while still achieving success - like a man selling dirty water in the desert - it may leave a bitter taste afterwards.

With that in mind, I fully expect Raging Heroes to get their act together by the time the Dark Elf KS rolls around and have:

- Well thought out stretch goals.
- Clear pledge tiers.
- Clear pledge rewards.
- Finalized concept work. They're never making the mistake of showing w.i.p. concepts, again, right?


Apologies if this is all terribly off-topic, I'll remove the post if it is, but it felt relevant enough.

 Hulksmash wrote:
The above is pretty much spot on for why I pulled my early bird pledge and never even went back in for a single model/box like I was considering.

Same for me. I was interested in the Necropriest, but decided there were too many red flags to throw my money at them blindly. Contributed to the Wargods KS which was running at the same time and felt was a far better managed and laid out KS. Clear stretch goals from the start and a large number of completed models to start with.

Thanks again for the analysis Buzzsaw. Great stuff

Thanks for the kind comments all,

silent25 wrote:

 Hulksmash wrote:
The above is pretty much spot on for why I pulled my early bird pledge and never even went back in for a single model/box like I was considering.

Same for me. I was interested in the Necropriest, but decided there were too many red flags to throw my money at them blindly. Contributed to the Wargods KS which was running at the same time and felt was a far better managed and laid out KS. Clear stretch goals from the start and a large number of completed models to start with.

Thanks again for the analysis Buzzsaw. Great stuff One question, how do you define the "Opening" and "Closing" days of the campaign. Looks like the opening is the first two, but I didn't see you define them clearly. Interested in what what periods you define those as.

My apologies, I thought I had been more specific, but perhaps I edited it out in a draft: the "opening" number is the sum of the first three calender days according to kictraq, "Final Days" is a little more murky, it should be the last 3 calender days, but as many pointed out, TGG ended at like 8AM EST. So for TGG the "Final Days" is the last four (4) calender days.

I usually didn't change things, if only because I don't have information allowing me to do so with confidence. The only other exception is in the case of Kingdom Death: Monster where the campaign began at Midnight on Black Friday, but for some reason a tiny sliver of pledges are placed on the day before. I considered the first full day Black Friday and added the money from the previous calender day to that.

"Interim" is simply the balance that is not included in the previous two categories.

 Tannhauser42 wrote:
I agree with this. I've backed quite a few nongaming Kickstarter projects, and stretch goals tend to be a rarity among them. I pledge for what I want, and I do not expect to get something more than that. When I go buy a car, I don't expect to see a sign saying I'll get X free accessories if they sell Y cars that month.

Miniatures games don't tend to have such well-defined boundaries, even when boxed sets are involved, since the miniatures range represents a line of mini-projects disappearing into the future. So it comes back to knowing how much of that bottle of scotch you can down without puking on grandma's shoes come Sunday and being willing to play it safe even when your mates are cheering you on and you're sure you can totally reach the bottom, bro.

 Azazelx wrote:
Alex. I know you just want cheap R&F. You made that abundantly clear previously. The point that I've made several times now in both threads is that RH are not a source of cheap R&F nor are they ever going to be. These are clearly not the droids you're looking for. These are not designed to compare directly to the decent-but-not-outstanding Cadian Plastics released over a decade ago. They have the same in-game use, but they are not in competition as they fulfil different aesthetic roles.

What Alex may or may not personally desire from Raging Heroes is hardly germane and continuing to repeat a point on which you both agree is no way to win an argument.

Your constant use of UK prices and best-outcome UK discounts (without factoring in shipping) as though they were actual options for you or I is somewhat dishonest as well.

Australian prices, with their inherent distortions, are hardly conducive to the making of a general comparison.

I'm sure there's still plenty of people in the potential market for these figures. It's not like everyone who has the potential to be interested in something like this is willing to drop $500+ on concept-art product with unseen renders in an unknown material a year in advance. People paying for Forge World Elysians or DKOK, or Vic Minis figures and so forth have the option to get the figures they've paid for shipped immediately. To suggest that the full market for a figure range is tapped before it's even released is just silly.

So the salient point of difference is that you believe the value of future sales at the current price points will render the range commercially viable and Alex does not. Was that really so hard?

I've had a sobering thought concerning the future viability of RH's Jailbirds... what if they cause an upswing in the presence of Catachans on gaming tables.

Now that is scary...

 Construct wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:
Alex. I know you just want cheap R&F. You made that abundantly clear previously. The point that I've made several times now in both threads is that RH are not a source of cheap R&F nor are they ever going to be. These are clearly not the droids you're looking for. These are not designed to compare directly to the decent-but-not-outstanding Cadian Plastics released over a decade ago. They have the same in-game use, but they are not in competition as they fulfil different aesthetic roles.

What Alex may or may not personally desire from Raging Heroes is hardly germane and continuing to repeat a point on which you both agree is no way to win an argument.

Speaking of moderators, there's been some very unnecessary rudeness in this thread. I'm mostly looking at you, Azazelx.

Be polite! It's in the rules. Disagreeing with someone is no call for that.

Also, this thread is moving off-topic from the initial post of the analysis of this Kickstarter. Please get back on topic.

Thank you.