Kickstarters: Victims of Success?
Kickstarter Fatigue. Who’s feeling it?
More and more Kickstarters seem like a massive advertising campaign. Companies announce they’re running a kickstarter way in advance. People count down to them. They seem more like pre-orders with Early Bird incentives. Kickstarter feels like its original idea, of helping small companies reach the funding they need to get off the ground, arguably one of the hardest things for any company to do, is getting trampled into the dust by big companies seeing it as “the next big thing” to promote themselves
How many Kickstarters projects have we seen fail? We see those fail to reach there targets outright like Rick Priestly’s “Beyond the Gates of Antares“and we see ones that reach their funded target, but because they don’t smash it and start adding on tons of free stuff people pull out (like THON).
What happens to you if you run a Kickstarter, do well, but not exceptionally. You use that money and set up your moulds, spend time hiring sculptors for models, writers for rules. You dispatch your pledges, set up your webstore and…nothing. No one buys anything, cos the only people interested have just gotten all the models they wanted, and at a discount too (cos pledges tend to be at lower costs than buying them afterwards). And chances are the delay in getting funding and getting your deliveries done is enough that the enthusiasm in your game has well and truely passed. What happens then?
I am just starting to feel fatigued by Kickstarters everywhere I turn. And their own successes are damaging them. There’s only so much money out there to give, and with more and more projects popping up that money is getting thin. Soon money will be spread thin enough that no one will be able to afford any more and some truly deserving projects will go unnoticed. I’ve already seen people saying they “like this project by Y, but X company is releasing their next Kickstarter soon so I’ll save my money for that”.
And at the end of the day, you’re giving money up for nothing. That is how Kickstarter is. You give money to company for them to succeed. You get free stuff for your donation, but you’re not buying it. It may seem like that, but you aren’t buying the products. You’re pledging money with the knowledge you’ll get a “free” reward for it. And most the time you’re free gifts don’t exist in any form other than a simple 3D rendering when you fork over the money. Because if it already existed, why would the company need a Kickstarter to produce it?
With all that said if GW were to put up a Kickstarter for a new version of Necromunda I would sell my soul to throw money at that….
