Plast Craft Games are in financial troubles

[iceeagle85Participant 4967xp 4]

As a backer of Exo: Mankind reborn I got this update today and I thought it might be of interest to some of you:

 

First of all we want to apologize about these past weeks leaving the Kickstarter project and private messages unattended. As you may already know we were not able to succeed with Dark Flow KS campaign and that situation among other private issues forced us to reorganize our situation and even the company.

We invested a lot on this new project and we expected results that never came. We needed some time to reorganize our workforce and this caused the unattendance of EXO: Mankind Reborn project.

After this failure, we are experiencing a really hard personal and economical situation and these inevitably affects to EXO: Mankind Reborn.

We have already delivered two thirds of the packages but there is still the other third to be shipped. All the games are produced and the rest of the pledges are ready but, unfortunately the new situation on the company forces us to delay indefinitely the rest of shipments. We expect to solve this situation in about two months but we cannot assure anything right now. We valuated different scenarios and, believe it or not, these was the only way to keep going on and eventually deliver all the games.

We wanted to be honest on this update.  We understand your disappointment but we cannot do anything else for the moment but working hard, keeping you updated and trying solving this sad situation as soon as possible.

Sincerely – Plast Craft Games Team.

 

As you can read they are in trouble.

Another display of the bad sides of Kickstarter,  putting too much money in a project that might not succeed and maybe even setting the funding goal to low to get funded (Dark Flow reached it’s funding goal) and attract more backers.

I hope they can get out of this sutuation, partly because I’m still waiting for my game but also becausge I liked the Bourak and Quantronic scenery the have even if I haven’t bought anything from them yet.

[phaidknott 7023xp 1]

Another company hit by the Sword of Damocles that is the Kick Starter (although I still don’t know why “smaller” KS schemes go with an alternate crow funding platform as KickStarter itself takes a pretty large commission). It was a “branch out” from the usual Plast Craft product into an oversaturated “boardgame with minis” market (which is pretty dominated by the “Big Boys” of the KS schemes like CMON, Mythic, Monolith, Mantic etc which take the majority of gamers crowdfunding spend and effectively don’t allow the smaller companies in (they just use KS as an advertising and pre-order tool). Sad to see, and I hope they can recover and leave this KS madness alone (and I think the bubble has burst on most KS schemes as gamers are definitely feeling a “KS fatigue” as we are constantly spammed with KS news almost every other day).

[seldonParticipant 691xp 0]

Please no.. I love their products .. they are an awesome company..

[limburger 21704xp 0]

oh man … to have a partially shipped kickstarter and fail must be one of the suckiest things ever for everyone involved.
At least they’re smart enough to cancel their ‘Dark flow’ kickstarter, because I doubt they could complete it even if they reached their target.

@phaidknott : even in regular retail market these tiny companies would have failed.

There’s only so much new product shops can stock and people can play. The big boys always have the advantage, unless one of the tiny developers gets really lucky .
Kickstarter and the internet makes this process a lot more visible to anyone with even a minor interest in the hobby.

I think the bigger issue is that the average kickstarter needs to over-fund in order to have a chance of getting everything shipped to backers.

Mythic, Monolyth and Mantic aren’t exactly ‘big’ companies either …
Even CMON has the vast majority of their production outsourced to China so their total work force isn’t that big compared to any other industry.

[iceeagle85Participant 4967xp 1]

Sadly they made some mistakes. Inspired by the sucess of Exo:Mankind Reborn (249% funded) the put another game on Kickstarter before the first one was fully fulfilled, which they believed would be a sucess and it seems they needed more money than the founding goal to be a sucess and probably quiet a bit more to make money for their company.
And they invest such a amount of money that the failure of said project would endanger their company.

And they did all this as a company that is practically unknown in the boardgaming market and on Kickstarter. Yes some people probably got their copies of Exo: Mankind Reborn before the launch of their new KS but it was not enough the create hype for the game and get them known as a company that makes good boardgames.
So all in all in my opinion this was a very risky move they made and sadly it backfired.

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