Episode 4 - Kickstarter and Memoir '44
Hello and welcome to episode #4! In this episode, we have a discussion about Kickstarter's role in the board-gaming industry. We then review the classic gateway wargame, Memoir '44!
Memoir '44 is a game based on the historical battles of WWII.
The board, set up and ready to go.
Look at all those itty-bitty things to set up. Placing terrain tiles and soldiers will take you a while.
Close-ups of the board. The miniatures are really awesome and evoke that "playing with army men" feel.
An example of setup instructions in the rulebook. This is the page for the scenario I have set up above.
The cards that you will use to order your troops. You will find that you often do not have the card you need.
The opposite side of the board, which features terrain for a beach landing scenario.
You need cash to do a project. That is what Kickstarter is for. It's not a donation, it's an investment. That's the premise of it. It's along the same lines of buying stock in a company/project, so in a sense the Kickstarter creator does owe people something, that is, the project that the person is Kickstarting. They are called backers, much along the same lines as investors in a company because it's essentially the same thing. Likewise, if you invest in a startup because you think it will be profitable and it fails, then you lose your investment. I think the attitude of the average joe to Kickstarter as a donation may not be a bad attitude, but just because you have a couple of games with labels printed on published material, doesn't mean that the cash needed to physically print the components and the game itself aren't available. Print shops aren't going to wait until you sell the game to collect the fees and the cost for the game itself. I think today, people in general have a misconception of cost of product.
ReplyDeleteMy advise about treating Kickstarter funding as a "donation" is really based more around managing expectations than anything else. The incident we described in the show (the backer who was extremely upset over production delays) seemed to me to be an increasingly obvious trend of unrealistic expectations and entitlement. I absolutely agree that the project creator is responsible to their backers in a very real way. But I also believe that backers can avoid some of the hyperbole and vitriol that is sometimes aimed at projects by looking at the funding as more "donation with a goal" than "investment". After all, Kickstarter's terms-of-service do not require the project creator to meet their projected deadline, they only require that a "good faith" effort is made and that the project is delivered eventually. A lot of people don't realize this and consider Kickstarter to be a preorder service rather than a funding one.
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