Reply To: So the recent 9th age Kickstarter campaign failed to fund. Any thoughts on why?

[onlyonepinman 18062xp 2]

10 grand is a lot of money just to improve the packaging of an existing product and probably gives people even less incentive to back when they can get those miniatures at any time.  I had assumed maybe they were changing the materials they were being cast in.

So far I can see two main failures here:

1) No urgency.  The Kickstarter wasn’t offering people anything they couldn’t already buy or buy any time they want.  This would have been exacerbated by running the campaign at Christmas – had it been run mid year, the discount on the miniatures bundles might have tempted a few more people.

2) No Unique Selling point. The miniatures failed to stand out from the rest of the market either in terms of design or cost.  Nice sculpts but not massively original and fairly pricey.

I don’t think it failed specifically because 9th Age is a rank and file Wargame; £10,000 isn’t a huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but if you can’t make people feel like they NEED to back right now or miss out on something then I think you’re always going to struggle.  And for a rank and file game, there are comparable options available in hard plastic for less money.  I wonder if maybe they just haven’t understood their audience?  Although 9th Age is a successor to WFB, it’s not limited to a single miniatures range and never has been.  That’s probably part of the attraction in that you can create a large army in 28mm for significantly less than you could buying GW miniatures just by using historicals or companies like Mantic and now warlord. How much of market is there in the 9th Age community for a more expensive product such as this?  I’m sure that there is a market for them, but is it big enough to justify a Kickstarter?

This isn’t me having a dig either, as a former Bretonnian player, I really like those Equitaine models – but they are quite pricey and I doubt I could afford to build a full army of them.