Okay, that’s an attention-grabber of a post title, I will admit. After all, what I want to talk about might not exactly be a problem with Kickstarter exactly, but it’s definitely an issue. Bear with me.
So I was talking with a friend of mine who is a retailer of boardgames, and we were discussing the distribution side of the industry. If you did not know: the distribution side of the boardgame industry is remarkably fuckety. Basically every boardgame publisher is signing exclusive distribution deals, which in turn places retailers at the mercy of the distributors, and the distributors are not always brilliant. My retailer friend complained that he was at present completely unable to purchase Filosofia/Z-Man boardgames because the Canadian exclusive distributor was, in essence, not doing its damn job.
Anyway, this conversation eventually led its way to Kickstarter, and said friend dislikes Kickstarter even more than he does distributors because the entire sales paradigm, for him, gets screwed with. He has to constantly explain to people when he carries a formerly-Kickstarted product that, no, he doesn’t have the Kickstarter promo bonuses because those don’t come with the mass-market release. Each Kickstarter has its own, shall we say, eclectic release schedule. Reprints are never guaranteed and usually are not expected: Kickstarter products are one-shots. And this last element is especially problematic because good retailers depend on shelf stock to grow the business. After all, retailers – even those who smartly use the internet to promote their business wisely – need to compete with the Amazons and eBays of the world and the only way they can still do it is by having deep stock so that if you want X, they will most likely have X.
But the Kickstarter problem for boardgames goes beyond just retailers – it’s about boardgaming as a whole. Every new product depends on word of mouth. These are not products intended to create new gamers; they’re intended for an existing audience. Steve Jackson Games right now is Kickstarting a new super-deluxe edition of OGRE, their classic “one giant mega-tank versus an army” game – but how is this going to create new OGRE players? Shouldn’t the point of any new product launch be to both satisfy the target audience and expand the existing base? (I note that SJG has offered, as a benchmark goal that is still approximately $50,000 away, a “mini edition” of OGRE – AKA “the entry-level edition that new players might actually buy sight unseen.) Is anybody ever going to see super-deluxe OGRE on a shelf and think “let’s try that?”
Kickstarter is targeted-marketing that depends heavily on word of mouth. That’s fine for many things. But it worries me that it’s becoming a primary business model for game publishers, because I doubt that such a model is sustainable in the long run.
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I don’t know a whole lot about board game publishing specifically, but it is always going to need that physical component which is expensive to produce. For video games and even books, the digital versions once developed can distributed forever, which seems to work favorably with Kickstarter’s one-shot model.
It seems a shame, as Kickstarter’s purpose in allowing niche products to find a supportive audience is a good one, but physical game distribution is certainly a different beast.
SJ (person and/or company) may want to do a larger OGRE release but as their business lately is about 60-80% Munchkin, it’s hard for them to do much else. Even GURPS has been struggling along at close to a loss. I am not sure what a good halfway solution for retailers and designers would be, especially with the distribution being as it is.
I am not convinced that the Deluxe OGRE is significantly less appealing to new gamers than the Descent box set or other recent “giant” games with comparable price points and heft. The fact that OGRE can be taught 10 minutes, and that introductory scenarios played in half an hour, actually make it *more* salable, not less. (Being a 2-player game does work against it, though.)
Your larger point–that Kickstarted games are generally guilty of poor followthrough in the traditional market–is well taken, though.
The most successful Kickstarter campaigns seem to overlap a core gaming audience with a non-gaming audience interested in the game’s theme.
For example, “Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple” really hit it big by reaching out to fans of “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” In this manner, the audience for board games might grow. Might. No guarantee, especially with so many titles coming out right now, but it’s a possibility.
It’s targeted at a *really* niche audience – but I cover (some) similar ground (and some other points which would also apply to the boardgame publishing biz) in this 15 minute video blog thing railing against Crowdfinancing in film (and other “complex” projects):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQsHr-OfaUw
Ogre Designer’s Edition is a special case: it’s Steve Jackson’s baby, and it’s being done below cost so that he can have a ginormous version of Ogre. It’s print-to-order, and they have no intention of reprinting it once they sell through the initial printing. (source: Phil Reed, somewhere in the BGG Ogre fora.)
Minor quibble aside, I agree wholeheartedly with the thrust of this post. Didn’t we already play the “effectively only one distributor” game ten years ago, and didn’t it end badly for everyone concerned?
Chris Farrell (a well known dude on BGG) wrote a nice post about another problem with Kickstarter: it reduces the incentive for the designer to properly test and develop the game. Goes on about it in this blog post (which has some good points about Kickstarter regardless of whether or not you agree with his opinion on Eminent Domain):
http://illuminatinggames.blogspot.ca/2011/11/eminent-domain-kickstarter-and-you.html
How many Kickstarter campaigns also steal away a game’s most enthusiastic customers? I just pledged for the new Sentinels of the Multiverse expansion but I bought the first expansion right off the shelf of my favorite local store.
It’ll be nice to get the new expansion in the mail, but I can’t ignore the fact that my favorite store loses out.
If the complaint was that Kickstarter relied on delivering engraved calling cards on a silver tray, I would get it. Or buggy whip holders.
But word of mouth is the complaint? We have a social media singularity approaching and no one knows what is on the other side. You weren’t knocking word of mouth when it was winning you Canadian blogging awards!
This is like complaining in the late 90s that Amazon would fail because you aren’t sure people want to spend too much time online.
Give it a decade, bro. Then talk to us about word of mouth.
It’s not a complaint that Kickstarter will fail. It’s a complaint that Kickstarter will hurt the boardgaming industry as a whole. Kind of like the complaints that Amazon will hurt books as a whole. Which it is. In both cases the death of the traditional gatekeepers has resulted in a few missed gems getting wider exposure and an awful lot more undercooked crap being widely available.
If I may comment….There is no exclusive Canadian distributor for Zman Games. Retailers are free to order their games from any distributors in Canada. Kind regards, Sophie
The point of a product launch is not “to both satisfy the target audience and expand the existing base” – the point of a product launch is to make money. If your business is built around the expectation that a product launch will grow a consistent base audience for you, but your product strategies don’t achieve that, then yeah, you’ll have a problem – but you had that problem before Kickstarter if you were making hobby games.
Having deep stock is only one of many possible retail strategies. A retailer who can’t figure out how to sell something that’s only going to be available a short time is a retailer who is, I’m sorry, an idiot. The methods for that are well known.
But gaming retailers who think they have a right to their business model are nothing new…
As much as I love Brink and Mortar Board Game stores – they are already dinosaurs. The in-store markup on board games is like 30-40%; I never buy from them unless I REALLY want to support a store, or impulse buys (rare!).
As for the hobby’s audience, I will show my cool game to new friends, tell them I kickstarted it, show them the other cool projects on kickstarter, they kickstart those games… this isn’t theoretical. That’s how I started kickstarting projects, and I’ve spread the love to others.
How many people “randomly” discover euro games anyway? I’d say most of our hobby grows ‘word of mouth’.
Kickstarter also hasn’t resulted in a glut of crappy games; it’s resulted in some AMAZING games, which would have never seen the light of day otherwise.
Just because we cut out a board game distributor (or a book publishing house, or a music record label) doesn’t mean the industry suffers. It just changes. Adapt or die.
As an amateur game designer I fail to see any way OTHER than a crowd sourced method like Kickstarter for me to be able to create a release a potential product.
I don’t have a large amount of investment capital to spend on getting a print run made myself, nor do I have the ability to travel around hawking my idea to numerous companies who are probably flooded with suggestions from other game makers as it is.
What it amounts to is that without set ups like Kickstarter there ISN’T a way for lots of these games to get made, and even if they don’t have huge print runs its certainly more satisfying to know that some people would be playing and enjoying a game that I had a hand in rather than it just being an idea on a shelf in my house.
> As an amateur game designer I fail to see any way OTHER than a crowd sourced method like Kickstarter for me to be able to create a release a potential product. <
This is a frustrating misconception. Yes, like any creative endeavor, publishing a game as a first-time designer is very hard. Yes, it requires a huge amount of legwork, face time with influencers, self promotion, and that you actually design a good game. But many first-time designers get published every year by Z-Man, a few by Rio Grande, and lots of smaller publishers are on the lookout for new designs. Industry "insiders" are very accessible – you just need to go to a game convention. Compared to books or music, the work required to get your game in front of people who can publish it is positively trivial. It seems to me that the main obstacle to getting published is in fact what it should be: the ability to produce a good game. Most amateurs can't.
Have you taken into account the fact that some people don’t have the ability to travel around much?
I come from one of the poorest cities in the nation & whatever money I don’t use for food goes to rent. I can’t afford to go running around different conventions hoping to catch someones eye in the hopes that just maybe they’d be interested in my idea.
An excellent essay! Yes, I would concur that OGRE is an example of how NOT to do a kickstarter. What started as a very un-ambitious and expensive product has now turned into a niche expensive product. OGRE is a simple enough game that a big-box, pre-molded-pieces production could be a big hit. Considering that SJG reported having an excellent 2011, and they have had great success with their molded figures in the past, the new OGRE kickstarter is disappointing.
Given how long this Ogre edition has been on the back burner at SJ Games (in 2010, they planned on it being a 2011 release, and let’s just take a look at the calendar right now), I’d say that the way this deluxe edition brings in new players is by actually existing as a purchasable product. They’ve basically increased their gross for 2012 by about 10% of their total gross from 2011, and now have solid data that a mass-market reprint might actually be viable.
Anyone who thinks that this is a worse state of affairs than the usual SJ Games “Steve really thinks this would be cool but there’s eighteen other things to write” state of affairs is welcome to prove it by beating me two times out of three in a Hot Lead battle.
I agree that Kickstarter isn’t a sustainable model for producing games (or anything, really); I’m just not convinced that the old publisher/distributor/retailer relationship model is sustainable anymore, either.
It seems like something big has changed in the marketplace, but no one knows what they can or should do to get ahead of it. I certainly don’t, and I feel bad for stores and developers and even — grudgingly — for distributors. I hope they figure out a way of getting to turn a healthy profit with games, because it truly sucks to lose your livelihood.
I see your point, but I think a lot of the problem of Kickstarter is that the nature of its model – people can donate and get promos but not share in the profits. It pretty much guarantees that the the products will be niche offerings that only hardcore fans will want to spend money on, instead of products with broad appeal. The limit also means that real investors with serious money will never get involved, which you’d need to produce a reasonable amount of stock.
The JOBS Acts does remove some of the barriers to crowdfunding, like allowing companies to raise a million a year online from investors who can share in the profits and streamlines the process for filing with the SEC, so maybe this will change. Of course, the law also requires an actual business plan for the company, which I doubt most Kickstarter projects have.
@Tucker: Thank you for correcting my error. Given my semantic imprecision about the “complaint,” it is of course now safe and completely rigorous to extrapolate the consequences of word of mouth on current business models beyond the upcoming social media singularity.
Kickstarter isn’t sustainable in the long run for a lot of reasons. Right now (especially in video games) a lot of money is being thrown around based on nostalgia and dreams, but reality will intercede with some nasty consequences moving forward.
Gamers love to hate publishers, and creatives / developers love having someone to blame, but there is a huge possibility that without someone cracking the financial whip of discipline that all that Kickstarter money is poured away and the project never sees the light of day. Or has features cut and releases in a reduced state. Or goes for another Kickstarter to get it over the line.
There has already been the case of a game company spending a lot of their Kickstarter money funding their pledge gifts, which possibly means they won’t be able to finish the game. They might finish, but they’ve already made it harder for themselves.
Plus it shifts the product risk heavily to gamers while keeping profits with the developers. And I’ll be interested to see gamer reactions the day that a Kickstarter game they helped fund sells out to a big publisher and / or is found to be using their Kickstarter money to pay for advertising, not development. There will be much wailing and nashing of teeth, I’m sure.
Kickstarter fills a niche. In the past we called it “preordering”, where people pay for products before they’re even made. All Kickstarter is doing is bypassing distributors and retailers and going straight to consumers for preorders, while giving them some (hypothetical?) protection that they’ll actually see the finished product. I’m not saying Kickstarter will save businesses or anything, but it is another symptom of the dying of traditional distributional and retail channels.
Anyway…. I gotta second those who say “the old methods don’t work anymore”. Publishers, distributors, retailers are being hit by advancing technologies and social changes. A savvy creator can fill all of those roles themselves if they want. Not to mention customer demands are driving prices lower and lower to the point that somebody (i.e. brick and mortal retailers and eventually distributors) is going to get phased out of the business, any business, eventually anyway.
The game/comic/music/book/electronics shop you love is going to either survive on impulse shopping or customer ethical stances. “Fiscally smart shoppers” will get their stuff on Amazon or eBay or other web vendors, focusing on sharp discounts or 2nd hand market prices.
@dirge93: Bricks and mortar retail being phased out in favour of online is going to have a lot of impacts, both intended and unintended.
I see a lot of comments around that people are happy for physical retail to die if it means that they can get it cheaper online, but I’ve a feeling that we won’t be able to see what is lost until long after it is gone.
@UnSub: I’m not saying the death of Brick & Mortar is inherently good (although customers and even creators might argue that), just inevitable.
B&M isn’t seen to provide a service to consumers. In the gaming community, I’ve seen countless complaints from people that their local game store is unfriendly, outdated in stock, limited in stock, and generally run like any other generic business. Meanwhile, the internet offers lower prices, an immensely larger selection, customer reviews, company previews, etc. etc. Heck, in the table top RPG world you can even get PDFs, which tend to kill B&M stores all the faster as PDF-preferring customers flock to internet retailers for the product they want.
[…] recently asked me, vis-a-vis my previous comments on Kickstarting board games, if there were any Kickstarters I would recommend. And there is definitely one: the […]
OGRE?
If I wanted to play DOTA, I’d just…play DOTA. Which I can do in about four hundred different ways, without getting up from the chair I’m sitting in right now, and all for free.
Filosofia took a bit of time to get their products up to their warehouse; but it seems to be flowing better now.
With regard to Kickstarter, it’s disruptive and it’ll be interesting to see what changes it brings. Sometimes, I wonder if we’re all worrying about nothing. Certainly, the number of Kickstarted games compared to ‘normal’ releases are quite small.