Reply To: When you don't give a damn anymore – KS burnout

[coxjul 13301xp 1]

It’s easy to gripe about everything – and I’ve contributed to that above… however consider the following:

There are games and other products that would not have seen the light of day if it weren’t for the crowdfunding business model.   I’m talking partly about the big box games such as KD:M, Gloomhaven+, Mythic Battles:X and others, especially those one-off runs.  I’m also talking about small niche offerings that aren’t at a scale to be commercially viable.

Alternative, conventional business models require a combination of the following:

• a need to evidence potential demand that supports the business case to go through expensive development and production cycles long before that demand can be hopefully realised as sales.
• a need to borrow from third-party investors whose only goal is to make money from that investment to fund development and production. Such investors will typically be relatively risk-cautious, mitigating that risk with bloated demands on returns. The economics of this leads to a ‘just-enough’ product model.
• a business model that relies on ongoing production and sales to get return on any initial investment as well as an expectation of ongoing revenues/returns.

Kickstarter and other crowdfunding approaches:

• Provide an up-front customer base (yes, I’ll call us customers as a generic term) committed to seeing the product come to existence and on their shelves
• Provide interest-free up-front funding from customers prepared to pre-pay (funding the bulk of development/production) that changes the debt model from meeting investor expectations to meeting customer expectations.
• Allows one-off production runs for product that would never otherwise be viable.

The issue in not the model itself, but how certain players have exploited it as a wild-west funding model based on pre-orders that provides the ability for some to turn around later and hold backers to ransom – “give us more or we can’t do it”.

I can thank sources like BoW/OTT for revealing opportunities to participate in campaigns, but there’s a fine line between providing information and stoking the FOMO flames.  I’m afraid to say I now treat any recommendation from any source with a pinch-of -salt, and do my due-diligence.