Wasteland wrote:
Oh FFS
How does no one at this company have any idea what products they're discontinuing??

 Wasteland wrote:
Oh FFS
How does no one at this company have any idea what products they're discontinuing??

 frankelee wrote:
I've noticed that the Gothic starter sets have been very slow in moving off my two FLGS' shelves. While an interesting novelty I don't think it has the wide appeal a new lance box with Mechs from the three main eras in it has. One big thing about their new approach to selling the game is the easy bite size nature of it, a lot of fans will say to themselves, 'why not pay $25-30 and add those Mechs I don't have to my collection?' Or even 'why not pay $60-70 and forcebuild with 13 more Mechs in the AS Starter?'

But eight Mechs that look different, but aren't really new, don't add anything to your gaming universe, and cost twice as much as you're used to paying, it's got a lot working against it.

I'd think their terrible IS infantry and battlefield emplacement boxes would be worth no longer making, in addition to cancelling the monster box.

 frankelee wrote:
Anything's possible. We'll have to see how much they lean into this "elseworlds" line.

 frankelee wrote:

Spoiler:

I've noticed that the Gothic starter sets have been very slow in moving off my two FLGS' shelves. While an interesting novelty I don't think it has the wide appeal a new lance box with Mechs from the three main eras in it has. One big thing about their new approach to selling the game is the easy bite size nature of it, a lot of fans will say to themselves, 'why not pay $25-30 and add those Mechs I don't have to my collection?' Or even 'why not pay $60-70 and forcebuild with 13 more Mechs in the AS Starter?'

But eight Mechs that look different, but aren't really new, don't add anything to your gaming universe, and cost twice as much as you're used to paying, it's got a lot working against it.

I'd think their terrible IS infantry and battlefield emplacement boxes would be worth no longer making, in addition to cancelling the monster box.

chaos0xomega wrote:
So still no idea what forcepacks were discontinued after like... 3 months?

 Ghaz wrote:

 Wasteland wrote:
Oh FFS
How does no one at this company have any idea what products they're discontinuing??

Loren Coleman would know, as he's the founder of Catalyst. Rem would just need to remember to ask him about it at the directors' meetings and then hope that he remembers off hand what has been retired without needing to look it up.

Lorcan Nagle wrote:
Episode 81
17th March 2026
Guests: Rem Alternis, outgoing CGL community and marketing director, intereviewed by Michael Ciaravella





News:
-New releases
--Force Manual Mercenaries
--Shrapnel 24
--Heritage by Giles Gammage (free fiction for March)
-March
--Illician Lancers Command Lance (B&N Exclusive for 6 months)
-From April (these will be spread out over a few months)
--Clan Battle Star
--C-Scale Mad Cat
--Salvage Box: Legendary Warriors
--Map Pack: Volcanic
--Map Pack: Glacier
--BattleMats: Fire and Ice
--BFM: Fire and Ice
-June (tentative)
--Map-scale Leopard DropShip
--Map-scale Union DropShip remaster
-Summer
--Aces: Snowblind


Discussion:
-Prior to working with CGL, Rem had done her own Kickstarter for a Shadowrun fanfilm, and via her company she’d ran Kickstarters for a comic series called Coddlesworth’s Clockwork Circus, Pure Alchemy Soaps, Gangs of the Undercity and Subversion for Fragging Unicorn Games,
-Part of why Rem started the Kickstarter management side of the business was because there’s a maxim that you’re ready for your first Kickstarter after you finish your first one. So she figured having run one herself she could help people
-For the marketing side there’s a big hole in the industry where companies can’t afford a marketer, so if she can hire a marketing person to a full-time job and that person would do five hours a week for Client A, ten for Client B and so on.
-Most exciting part of the job? The Hollywood stuff - playing Shadowrun with the Critical Role guys, the Realmsmith games, playing BattleTech with Freddie Prinze Jr
-She really liked the community building, stuff like the Discord, Tuesday Newsday. It’s very hard to make the time to manage these things so carving out the time was very worthwhile
-Capacity remains an issue though.
-If she was to stick around for five more years,
--she’d like to have done more with content - sponsorship and affiliate programs,
--more actual plays,
--expand the social media presence into groups,
--specific game Discord servers,
--integrating more with Shadowrun Missions online,
--more press releases
--Better product scheduling and formal pre-orders
-It’s nice to see more retailer support out there, like the Grinder kits finally making it out there. She’d love to get more retailer-focused marketing packets out there.
-Current clients
--Chessex
--XP Network
--Infinite Stories (GM tools to give groups access to assets on the fly if they need to throw imagery or similar into a game)
--Vector Tridens, a group of CGL demo players doing Exit Vector, their drone combat game
--Pure Alchemy soaps
--Kevin J. Anderson
--She has some new clients she can’t talk about
--Jason Hronsky from XP Network has some fairgrounds and flea markets and she’s doing some marketing for them
-She’s looking forward to getting some regular games back in, doing live plays, and recording them for later upload. She’s in the middle of doing a Legend of the Five Rings one. The plan is to record for a few days and then cut it up into one hour episodes. She’s also planning to do some Shadowrun rules shorts and revive her old interview show on GenCon TV
-She’d love to have a developer support division
-Rem will be doing Tuesday Newsday for at least another month
-She has a Patreon and a Discord server.



Q&A:
-WHO RULES CATALYST TOWN? Rem has plans in place!
-What are the two products CGL will be previewing at Adepticon? The new maps and BFM, a new sourcebook, a scenario from the demo team. They’ll have a massive restock of salvage boxes and some forcepack restocks on-sale (Kell Hounds was mentioned). It’ll be the first con the Kuritan Forcepacks will be on sale at in the US.
-Will Rem be at Gencon? She’s hoping to help with CGL livestreaming again, but that’s not confirmed to be happening at. She’ll be at CenCon either way, it’s unmissable for business opportunities.
-When can we have a Micheal Ciaravella bobblehead? When someone makes one!
-What is Rem’s con schedule for 2026?
--Garycon (with XP Network and maybe Chessex)
--Origins
--Gencon
--Gamehole Con
--Maybe more!
-Any update on XP Network going live for CGL and the Demo Team? They went live in January but there are logistical issues that are being worked on - pulling data from the old website to try and export into XP Network’s system. They’ve got too many agents for the google drive, and they’re implementing a solution for that side of things, and then merge it with XP Network.
-What systems are Rem most curious to check out? This is her first time playing Legend of the Five Rings, and she’s enjoying it. Next up for her is Mutants and Masterminds but it’s crunchy and she’s not a big fan of crunch. She really wants to try out Blades in the Darkness, Vasegrim and the Alien RPG
-Any update on Kerenskykon and Big Kappa shipment 3? There’s been delays with moving their warehouse from PSI to Platforms, so they need to chase that up. They need to do a separate poll of the Kappas to see what fiction they want in print, which John will do direct via Amazon. They sent out a survey for Kerenskykon recently asking people if they still want to come and where and when suits them, and they’re going to have at least six month’s notice. They’re waiting on the last few people to get back to them, but it’s looking like it’ll be the week Adepticon 2027
-Will Rem have a booth at Gamehole Con? Probably not. Towards the tail end of Covid she did booths at Origins, but it didn’t pull in much business. Going to the publishers and companies and taking meetings works much better

Project Update #138 wrote:State of Fulfillment - Eclipse is ready for download!

Hey MechWarriors!

We are happy to announce that the next audiobook, Eclipse by Jason Schmetzer, is now available to all backers at the Paper Pusher level and up! Eclipse is a classic novella following the storied Jeremiah Youngblood of Crescent Hawks fame as they fight to survive during the Word of Blake’s raging Jihad and live up to the reputation of such a famous unit in the shadows of greats like the Kell Hounds! It is a great read and we are happy to get this awesome audiobook to fans! This one was unlocked when the BattleTech: Mercenaries campaign hit $7.5 million in pledges!

You can access your copy of Eclipse by heading to https://battletech-mercenaries.backerkit.com and finding your digital downloads on your backer survey!

Progress continues on A Splinter of Hope by Philip A. Lee and A Rock and a Hard Place by William H. Keith. When we have more news on that front, we’ll make sure to let you know!

The Wars of Reaving trilogy is currently in the editing process, with the first book by Craig A. Reed Jr. under John Helfers’ eye at the moment. Graphic novel #1 is also moving ahead, and while we can’t show the first pages here yet, they are gorgeous!

____________________________________________________________________________________

North America, Australia, and RoW:

We are happy to announce that we can consider domestic fulfillment of Waves 4 and 5 complete! There are still some outstanding orders that are being handled on an individual basis, but overall, we are happy to be here!

In the last month, we have been investigating a slowly-growing number of reports about missing shipments. In trying to find where specific orders are in the fulfillment process, we have found a few mistakes. Primarily, there are several people that have not paid their portion of the shipping costs yet. Before we send you your order, you MUST pay your shipping charge on BackerKit. You can find the link to BackerKit at the bottom of this section to double check if your shipping charge has been taken care of. Once you are in, we have been sending these orders to get into the queue at Platforms.

We have also found some people that have fallen through the cracks with the changeover from QML or even during the QML process. Somewhere, somehow, there was a disconnect, and we have been working to find everyone that has had that issue. If you initially paid your shipping in 2024 and you haven’t received your order, there is a chance that you are one of these people. We ask that you post a comment or email store@catalystgamelabs.com as soon as possible so we can look further into these cases. We are setting up a process that should be able to fulfill your order outside of the Wave queue, but some may end up in there.

We apologize for this issue in particular. Things happen sometimes, which is understandable, but these are cases that we should have caught much sooner. We appreciate your patience as we continue to comb through Kickstarter-based pledges and BackerKit-based late pledges to find anyone that may have been missed in this campaign.

https://battletech-mercenaries.backerkit.com

____________________________________________________________________________________

EU, Non-EU Europe, and UK:

We do not currently have a final date for the remaining shipment to arrive at the Dutch hub. We have been working with the logistics team, and we hope to have that by our next bi-weekly update. This primarily affects our backers in the EU and UK.

For the time being, we are going to address our non-EU European friends here. There has been some confusion as to when then their orders will be shipped and from where. To be frank, we have had some conflicting information in the past, with those orders either being shipped from our Dutch hub, or from Platforms. Currently, it is hard to give a definitive answer, as we have worked with Platforms and they informed us that they would be shipping to places like Ukraine and Russia through FedEx. However, we have also heard that it would make more sense to ship from The Netherlands.

We don’t want to mislead you. We want you to have the correct information, and we want you to get your orders as soon as possible. So, as of right now, we are going to say that we are going to continue finding information, and that we should hopefully have it available to you in the coming weeks.

____________________________________________________________________________________

We are reviewing how this campaign has gone and where we can improve in the future. While we have had a post-mortem process in place for previous campaigns, we are expanding it for Shadowrun: Takedown, Leviathans: The Great War, and BattleTech: Mercenaries by working with the community. We do not have an announced date and time yet, but we plan on hosting a public discussion to get community feedback on these recent projects once a specific campaign is considered complete.

If you have previously emailed us at store@catalystgamelabs.com, please check your inbox’s spam folder for our response. We have recently seen some of our responses get flagged as such.

Please do not contact our partners about the status of your order. Our team monitoring Kickstarter comments and messages, as well as the customer service email at store@catalystgamelabs.com will be happy to help find your information as it is available.

Team Catalyst

 Kalamadea wrote:
it's a little wierd to have the starter set with no truly iconic mechs, but it does mean you aren't locking important things like the Awesome and Catapult into the starter set.