Reply To: Harry Potter 'Catch the Snitch' Kickstarter cancelled

[limburger 21708xp 1]

just because the project is ‘ready to go’ that doesn’t mean all of its components have been approved.
The Streetfighter game had to endure a ton of delays because Capcom couldn’t handle the quantity of art that the developers sent them to approve. The Evil Dead boardgame endured similar stuff. And I suspsect Aliens vs Predators suffered post funding issues with the approval proces as well.

They could have been very unlucky with pre-production minis (brittle resin shipped half way across the world?), but IMHO a game at that stage should be judged on its gameplay first and not on the actual components.

I doubt a mere one week delay is going to salvage anything other than a complete cockup in PR.

Reading through the kickstarter I’m more worried about their mastery of the English language :
” It is not as easy as explained, but it is true that our marketing campaign in US experimented unespected problems. As it is also true the fact that we are replaning the KS campaign. Best regards.”

Apparently their marketing was USA only …

The suggestions for lowering the funding goal are just plain silly.
If you need 500k to start production it makes no sense to set your target at 250k and pray you reach the stretchgoals to get it done. Your margins for failure become even smaller … and they’re unlikely to be huge if this is your first product.

Same applies to the pledge levels themselves.
If 100-150$ is the bare minimum they’d need to produce the game then lowering the pledge levels is only going to hurt them long term.

1$ pledge levels effectively mean that you’re gambling on having enough money post launch to order the extra resources needed to afford the extra games you need to produce. And because you won’t know what and how much those 1$ pledges are going to actually order you can’t plan for it until the pledgemanager closes. At which point you may be doomed as you’re locked in your budget for resources and may have to renegotiate with suppliers that may not have the ability to do so (production capacity is as much a resource as materials!). To say nothing of logistics which are a whole world of problems these days due to the Event (stay indoors!).

Short campaigns need not be a problem provided if and only if(!) their marketing is super agressive from pre-launch.
Given that they’ve clearly failed that … I’m not sure if they can recover, unless they hope that the cancelling helped.
I see cancelled kickstarters as a red flag, because it means they may not have the basics under control … so how would they deal with real set backs post launch ?