Harry Potter 'Catch the Snitch' Kickstarter cancelled

[tankkommanderParticipant 6423xp 1]

Knight Games (an offshoot of Knight Models) has cancelled their ‘Catch the Snitch’ Harry Potter Quidditch board game.

It got off to a slow start and clearly wasn’t going to reach the $375,000 funding goal.

They have blamed the US Election….yep, that is the reason they used.

Nothing to do with the bad campaign page, overpriced game, and other odd choices including not allowing $1 backers access to the pledge manager.

The preview models sent out to certain Youtubers were poor quality and arrived with breakages despite being wrapped individually in bubble wrap. They were not the quality of the renders they used on the campaign page, with much softer details etc.

 

[holly 12044xp 1]

That’s a real shame on all those points – I was planning on backing it if the price point was good.

Hope they address the issues and come back again

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/knightmodels/harry-potter-catch-the-snitch-a-wizards-sport-board-game

[sundancer 42976xp 1]

Blame elections…. that’s a new one XD

[limburger 21706xp 1]

the 1$ tiers are silly. Anyone with so little money shouldn’t risk anything on Kickstarter TBH.

Timing was ghastly for this kickstarter that’s for sure, but if your target market is the USA then you should have known not to pick election week. Although I’d argue that the UK would be the primary market for anything Potter related.

I’m also surprised that this kickstarter even existed … I had found an image while I was searching for info on that mystery figure in the UHH.

I would have expected a kickstarter from a major franchise like the Potter universe to be flooding all media weeks/days before it launches.
Maybe they simply picked an incompetent PR team ?

[laughingboy 20728xp 2]

I just had a quick look at it and $100 for that core box is ridiculous it deserves to fail, it should have been $50-60 max. Another cash grab on an over milked IP.

[captainventanusParticipant 4936xp 1]

Knight Models make some of the most amazing miniatures and have incredible talent in that regard. The Harry Potter game miniatures looked stunning. Beyond that they are borderline comical in incompetence. Sorry to be harsh.

This game has quite a few issues, but blaming the US election for “many technical problems on the web” is quite something and I would really hope that something got lost in translation. Citing that as a reason to pull a KS and reinstate it a week later is just not serious. The comments on the FB page indicate they really need to get to grips with the basics of PR.

[ced1106Participant 6224xp 1]

KM’s treatment of the HP license for the HP game was a disaster. From a boardgame perspective, the miniatures were too brittle for a gaming audience, and the combat gameplay was pretty much “Harry Potter fights a bunch of spiders”. In hindsight, HP isn’t the same sort of IP as DC and Marvel. HP is certainly not a franchise about fighting and combat, and I’d say that a HP resin miniature has to be marketed particularly so that it reaches its target audience. Maybe they should have just released a series of miniatures? Dunno.

Looks like it’ll restart in a week, but who knows if they’ve learned anything from their original HP game mistakes. November and December are bad months for a KS because of the holiday season (Amazon is particularly aggressive with the boardgame market) and sometimes taxes (you have to offset income in one year with expenses in the other).

[limburger 21706xp 1]

I’m not sure any project ‘deserves to fail’.

Of all the things Harry Potter the Quidditch game is one that should have been the first to be turned into a game as fans have turned it into a ‘real life’ sport.

OTOH … there’s the fact that they’re dealing with corporate entities and license holders who don’t have a clue about the tabletop market, so chances are they were talked into doing things that didn’t work. As such I’m not sure how much of this is their fault. IP is notoriously tricky and potentially lethal to a small company.

btw :
This is not Knight Models itself, but a ‘separate’ entity. Not sure how separate they are though.
However like certain other companies that reformed it need not be a bad thing.

[ced1106Participant 6224xp 1]

> there’s the fact that they’re dealing with corporate entities and license holders who don’t have a clue about the tabletop market,

Ah, right. And, if WB (or whoever owns the license) is anything like 20th Century Fox, they’re going to demand but not approve every step of the production in a timely manner, resulting in cost overruns and backers who may not get their stuff. IPs are a yellow flag. You don’t know if the licensor is going to cause problems with the project.

[tankkommanderParticipant 6423xp 0]

I assume that the project is ‘ready to go’ and has approval from WB. It does tie their hands on making changes from backer feedback. It looks like pricing is too high, and keeping named players as extras really means this is a $150 game, as the $100 entry point is just not at all interesting to HP fans.

My concerns is the quality of the minis. The detail is soft on the samples sent to a few YT’ers, and had breakages. This is a big red flag for the final product. I cannot believe that they are incapable of making detailed and durable minis with the plethora of materials available now.

The y appear to be tone deaf to backer comments, so I don’t have much hope a week, month or even a year will improve this KS.

[limburger 21706xp 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 ?

[holly 12044xp 1]

“ 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” – that’s a really valid point @limburger and one I’d never thought of before.

I am sad this KS has been cancelled as it seemed like the perfect next game for me and my son – who at only 7 is turning into an avid gamer and huge Harry Potter fan.

Given the amount of game (components, quality,longevity) we’ve had from other Kickstarter projects – unless it comes back next week 20-30% cheaper – it’s still going to be too much, sadly.

[soulman 2945xp 1]

I did watch a play though of the game… more about trying to grab cards then zooming around having fun. I guess in my eyes a “blood bowl” style of game was what would have caught my eye….

[dyn-ukParticipant 333xp 1]

The PR has been awe full on this – I live in a house of HP fans and mini fans and totally missed this Kickstarter.

Putting the names characters in a separate box to add on is risky – I get it from a money-grab point of view (they are a business), but I think that could put off many casual players.

[ced1106Participant 6224xp 0]

> I am sad this KS has been cancelled as it seemed like the perfect next game for me and my son – who at only 7 is turning into an avid gamer and huge Harry Potter fan.

Well, it’s not like there isn’t a ton of HP merchandise out there aimed at a young market. Amazon has over 800 results for boys 6-12, although I’m seeing only two Quidditch games. BGG lists several HP games. IIRC, Hogwarts Battle was well-received. Given KM’s mistreatment of the HP license for their first game, I don’t think there’s much to look forward to for their second. As someone who’s been burned on an IP KS, IMO, the *last* thing you should consider when backing a KS is the IP.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=harry+potter+toys+for+boys+6-12&crid=38EQ3YCPZ9HKM&sprefix=Harry+potter+toys%2Caps%2C232&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-a-p_7_17

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=quidditch&rh=n%3A165793011&dc&crid=R7BAYV1MH94F&qid=1604835484&rnid=2941120011&sprefix=quiddi%2Caps%2C229&ref=sr_nr_n_8

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeksearch.php?action=search&objecttype=boardgame&q=harry%20potter

https://www.amazon.com/hogwarts/s?k=hogwarts&rh=n%3A166220011&dc&qid=1604835752&rnid=2941120011&ref=sr_nr_n_9

[Author]

Posts