Kickstarter and pricing

You're looking to put rational parameters on irrational behavior. The same thing happened with eBay 20 years ago. Now eBay is the flea market you go to when there's no reputable seller on Amazon offering what you're looking for.

That's where Kickstarter will be ten years from now. In the meantime let stupid people do stupid things, and anything useful that comes out the far end will be available to you in the aftermarket. Seriously, Kickstarter is an IQ test right now.

S.

mads b. wrote: Say I need 100 bucks for my KS project and a game is 10 bucks. Then, if at one time 20 people sign up why couldn't I just charge their cards for 8 dollars which would still be above my goal?

KS charges the cards, not you. They then transfer the money to you (minus their cut, of course). So you couldn't do this.

Also, you're not allowed to change the tiers once you've set them.

Mads, in theory, you could still do that by setting up your own website and your own personal equivalent to Kickstarter. Of course, without the Kickstarter name and site, you would probably get few people to go for it.

There really is a bit of lunacy to this Kickstarter business at this stage. An established company like Steve Jackson Games shouldn't need Kickstarter to finance a big fancy Ogre reprint. They should be able to implement the same kind of Kickstarter deal on their own website, complete with arbitrary deadlines, incentives and promos. And yet I'm willing to bet that approach wouldn't have raked anywhere near as much money as their Ogre Kickstarter did.

Shellhead wrote: And yet I'm willing to bet that approach wouldn't have raked anywhere near as much money as their Ogre Kickstarter did.

The understatement of the century, since there are competitors to Kickstarter that charge much lower fees and don't get business because they aren't THE site to set up a preorder. IndiGoGo doesn't get half the press that Kickstarter does.

S.

I had a bit of an epiphany about Cthulhu Wars and their pricing structure. Clearly they know they will end up in the 1+ mill range, any big miniature KS seems to be hitting that range. Look at the Bones and Myth ones, by the end of the KS the stretch goals have added a ton of minis to what was originally the "base game" at roughly retail price. CW doesn't want to do this. They know they will be adding a ton of minis as "free" stretch goals so they artificially inflated the initial price (beyond those more reasonable "Early bird" specials needed to get early momentum) knowing that after a few weeks the $240 CDG tier will be much more reasonable once all the stretch goals have added unique sculpts and probably a few of the cheaper map based expansions thrown in. It is the natural evolution of minis based KS. The model count guys just look at the weight of plastic and the price per mini, the ODC "gotta have 'em all" guys try to see how much they can grab with just a single swoop, etc etc. Plus you have the 30 day rush of enthusiasm, the lure of KS only components, the intoxicating nature of the debates in the comments section generating consumer buy-in, fetishizing of stretch goals, all a heady brew of "why not?" marketing designed to part the fools from their money.

I fully expect a "mea culpa" to come in the form of a version of CW without all that plastic, priced at a level the real gaming market can actually tolerate. No fracking way a $170 game hits retail. They will keep a few of the GOOs and replace everything else with a counter or stand-up toon just to get the price to $80 where this game has a chance at longevity.

Grrr, this stuff really bugs me. But I know I'll be jumping in once a few more expansions are added to the CDG level. I am weak I clearly need another kid because the infant I have has not cured me of buying fantastically cool looking games that will never see the light of day (reference last month and Robotech).