Dead Earth’s Orphan 9 Assassin Coming To Kickstarter Today
July 7, 2017 by brennon
Launching this evening at 6pm BST you'll be able to get stuck into a small Kickstarter for the Orphan 9 Assassin for Dead Earth Games and Across The Dead Earth...
The new model will be coming out, ready to join your faction on the tabletop and go hunting some bad guys worth slicing up. She looks like a proper specialist operative with her katana and silenced pistol.
As mentioned above, this is only a small Kickstarter. But, if you like the look of the model then you can join in and get one for yourself!
Will you be picking her up?
"She looks like a proper specialist operative with her katana and silenced pistol..."
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Sigh…
This is getting really stupid. KickStarter is about raising funds for a project, not for pre-ordering single models.
If you can’t produce a single model with your own funds you’ve got issues…
In our experience people don’t really *do* pre-orders. Very, very limited numbers for small companies such as us certainly.
I think that might be because there has been a lot of negative press on pre-orders or it might also be because – with smaller companies – folks assume a certain level of risk. Either that the model may never arrive or that when it does it won’t look as intended.
We can certainly address those concerns and back that up with some history but that’s precisely what Kickstarter is set-up to do well and an online shop is very poor at. You explain the project, you explain the risks and you explain to folks how you mitigate risks and show them what you’ve put into it.
They then make a more informed decision and – to a greater extent – are protected.
I completely accept that there are many people that have already made a complete range and are using it entirely for marketing reasons. We’ve made as much as we’re showing and we want to make more. We could throw more money at it and make the whole scope up front and then take a punt on sales BUT we’re then risking money we currently have put aside to do things with a lower risk ratio but that aren’t KS friendly.
It seemed sensible to a pair of brothers trying to turn our hobby into something more but you’re utterly entitled to your opinion. 🙂
Do you like the mini though?
In my experience people do consider it a pre-order system.
You can hear it in the way they talk about it and see it in the way they react when something goes wrong. They see it as though they’re paying for something and get quite upset when they don’t receive what they think they’ve paid for.
Many backers, it seems, don’t really understand what’s happening when they pledge for a project, nor do they understand that if something goes wrong they have very little chance of getting anything back.
As a company you can address those concerns (and indeed you should) but that still doesn’t change the fact that KickStarter is not a shop and the backers are not buyers and have no consumer protection.
Buyer beware and never pledge money you can’t afford to lose.
As for your risk (as a company) I stand by what I said. If you can’t comfortably fund a single model you should seriously reconsider the way you’re doing business.
For me, the problem is that you put the cart before the horse. You take the money before you sell the product (often before the product is even produced). And once you’ve paid the sculptor and caster, settled the KickStarter fee, and delivered all the freebies you promised, what do you have left? 1% of the raised funds? 5%?
That’s not a sustainable way of doing things. You have no real surplus left so you’re forced back to KickStarter again to raise funds for the next project. It becomes a vicious cycle that’s incredibly hard to escape.
How many games are put on KickStarter? How many of those get funded? And how many of those ever get into retail?
Just my opinion, of course…
As for the model…
It’s nice, but it’s a bit too plain to make me go WOW. Perhaps seeing it from more angles will improve my perception of it. Ideally even a painted version.
But that sword… Sorry, but it doesn’t do it for me. It looks like an odd blend of a katana hilt and guard coupled with a single edge short sword. And I’m not sure why a high-tech looking assassin with a gun would even need a sword. It just looks… Misplaced, if that makes sense.
It was certainly an experiment for us, I can’t argue with that. We wanted to see how a “mini-starter” might pan out, what engagement people would enter in to and where traffic came from. Believe it or not the majority so far has come from people just trawling KS for minis. Maybe that’s peculiar to this hobby – maybe not, but it’s definitely “a thing” right now.
On the sword, well there’s backstory that covers it in our particular ruleset but each to their own. There’s new options now if you fancy it, quite a few options actually:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/chappellm/orphan-9-28mm-post-apocalyptic-assassin-miniature