More Kickstarter info

I got a response back from another Kickstarter-funded project, the game Inevitable designed by Jeremy Bushnell and Jonathan A. Leistiko. Like my earlier post on Jim Taylor's Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands project, I asked Jeremy what his results had been, and what percentage of his donors were known to him. My guess was that most of the Kickstarter donors were going to be friends and family or other folks connected to the project authors. In the case of Jeremy's Inevitable Kickstarter project, it looks like it's more like 50-50. Here's what Jeremy said:

In terms of the percentile mix that you're asking about: I have a pretty supportive social network, and a number of the contributions were from that group. We have one $500 backer who is a friend, and another $150 backer who is also a friend.   But our largest contributor -- offering $700 -- was a stranger to me.

A lot of the continued support we've been getting has been from strangers-- people who I assume found us through the Kickstarter page. The site has a good buzz on it right now, and a lot of people really are visiting it just because they want to find good projects. I haven't crunched the numbers on this, but I'd say that around 50% of the contributors are people who neither Jon nor I know personally, and when all is said and done we will definitely have gotten more money from strangers than from friends (the $700 donation from our mystery donor certainly helps to tip the scale that way).

Our $75 price point is far and away the most popular among strangers. It effectively works as a pre-order for people, with a few extras. (People are open to paying $50 for a game, and so getting your name in the credits and a feeling of good will for an extra $25 seems attractive to people.)

Like other projects, they've structured the Kickstarter project in tiers. The lower tiers provide low-cost rewards, like buttons and PDF versions of the game. To get a copy of the actual printed game, you have to put in $75. Roughly half of their funding is from that level, with the other half from three big donors (one at $350+, two at $500+).

They're doing a very small print run (100 games), so the relatively high donation level to get a game probably reflects the higher printing costs to make such a small print run. Their game is complex and has a lot of components, so I'd bet the printing and parts costs take up the majority of the $75 donation, depending on the quality of the board and packaging they use.

This makes Kickstarter look more promising as a way to whittle away at the huge start-up cost for printing games.  It's more suited to small production runs, like this one and Gentlemen, than to something larger, like starting a business, but most indie designs probably won't sell that many.  The PDF version of Inevitable also offers a low-cost, high profit-margin alternative for marketing the game, and the Kickstarter funds probably allow them more latitude when funding artwork and design.

Neat stuff to consider. My thanks to Jeremy for responding to my questions.

Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands and Kickstarter funding

I've discussed James Taylor's game, Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands, and his funding model, via Kickstart.com, in previous posts here and here. The quick summary is that James has used Kickstarter to amass nearly $9,000 toward production costs for his game, mostly in the form of pre-orders. He's pledged to print 500 copies, so he's raised just under $18 per copy - a reasonable price-per-copy for a small production run of a game without too many parts. You have to pledge at least $26 to get a copy of the game, so there's probably at least a small profit margin in there at that price point. Furthermore, he's raised the money via 141 pre-orders, so he'll have the opportunity to try to sell the remaining 359 copies he prints entirely for profit. With those numbers, this looks like a viable way to take the huge personal financial risk out of self-publishing a small print run of a game.

This is a model that I've now seen used on Kickstarter a couple more times, although most successfully with this game. In looking at this, my guess, stated in my last post, was that Kickstarter isn't a magical source of startup capital from strangers - instead, most of the funds raised are actually from relatives or friends of the authors.  But I didn't know.  So, I figured instead of just guessing, I'd ask, and James was gracious enough to reply. (Holy cow, I suddenly become an actual journalist!) He says:

"I would say I knew about 70% of the people who bought a copy of my game through Kickstarter. Some people think they can put a game on kickstarter and just wait for the masses of strangers on the internet to fund it, but that's not the way it works. Kickstarter even describes itself as a way to pool your own social network in order to raise funds."

So, there you have it. You're not going to magically produce money from places like Kickstarter - in some ways, it's kind of like a Tupperware-party hit-up-your-friends model, although more techno and less guilt-laden. What it does provide is a place to organize and raise startup capital, mostly from sympathetic friends and acquaintances (some of whom will probably get their copy of the game, play it once, and then put it on a shelf). Because you specify a minimum amount to reach before actually charging anybody, you actually place a bet on your game and gauge interest (and simultaneously find out how many friends you have).


If you're interested in the Gentleman game, there's an interview with Jim about the game here, and a commentary by one of his professors, Henry Jenkins, here. It looks pretty clever - a simple concept, but a really fun theme.

Kickstarter again, and more economic woes

Via BoardGameNews, here's another instance of a company seeking startup capital to launch a board game project via Kickstarter.com.  Their game is called Alien Frontiers.  I discussed this funding method in an earlier post.  This is actually working for some folks, I guess - two Kickstarter projects I linked to last time have both met their goals for startup capital, one of $3000, one of $7600.  I'm still not sure how many of the preorders are random web wanderers and how many are family and friends - my guess is that it's a lot of the latter.

Like those earlier funding efforts, this campaign offers donors a chance essentially to pre-buy a copy of the game.  Let's run the numbers:

• They're trying to raise $5000 to print 1000 copies of the game, or $5 a game.  
• That's a small print run; I bet their costs per copy are at least $10, more probably $15-20 or more, depending on components or packaging.
• Therefore, the $5 per copy they're raising on Kickstarter isn't going to come close to covering it all; they're going to have to put in $10-$20,000 of their own money.  
• Their total revenue for selling out this print run would be $50,000, if they sell all of the games at their list price of  $50.

Suppose they complete the Kickstarter campaign.  Roughly speaking, they'll have collected $5,000 of capital, and they'll have pre-sold 100 of their 1000 games.  They blow that $5000 and another $10,000 (conservatively) on their print run, and ship the pre-ordered games.  Now, they have to make $10,000 back on 900 games to break even.

• Suppose they sell all of them at list, that's $45,000, or $25,000 net.  A great return, but not realistic.
• Suppose they sell all of them, but at distributor prices (say a 60% discount).  That's $18,000, or $8,000 net.  Not so great.
• Suppose they only manage to sell 400 of them to distributors, and the other 500 stay in an attic somewhere, eventually discovered by their descendants playing hide and seek.  That's $8,000, or a net of $2,000 lost.

I think my numbers are relatively conservative, and, very importantly, they don't include business and operating costs - shipping, storage, marketing, commissions, damaged goods, returns, travel, lost components, etc. - which can be pretty large.  Also, it looks like Kickstarter takes a 5% cut of your funding off the top before you even see it, so that's even worse.

This gets to the problem with independent game publishing.  The numbers are stacked against you; there's a huge initial printing cost, and you have to do a big print run to bring the per-unit cost down.  Then, you have a pile of games you have to work to sell, without the connections and reputation of a major manufacturer, and you bleed more money all the time trying to attract customers.

People make this work, as new game companies emerge every year, but I wonder how lucky these few are.  How many are left as burning wreckage by the wayside, thousands of dollars in the hole?  I wish these Alien Frontiers guys well; their game looks neat, although investing $50 in a game I've never seen with an uncertain future printing date isn't something I'm comfortable with at the moment.  They're trying something useful, though - getting buy-in from others through something like Kickstarter is a great risk-free way to distribute the investment (and the risk) from the designer/publisher to a broader group of interested parties.

Funding via Kickstarter.com

One independent game design partnership, creators of Inevitable: The Game, has managed to fund publication of their game through an online donation-collecting site called Kickstarter.com. Their fundraising page is here.

The deal is, they can collect donations of any amount through the Kickstarter project. If they reach their goal over the fund drive period, they get to keep the pledges. If not, then it all just goes away, and they get nothing. They are going to use the money to design and produce a print run of 100 games, which is really small for a game production run. They've promised rewards to donors, such as PDF copies of the game, one of the games from the print run, T-shirts, and other stuff.

It looks from the link as though the Inevitable project reached $3000 in funding already from nearly 30 donors in only eight days. That was their goal, which means they'll get the money. Great for them!

Here's another game project, Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands, also fully funded through Kickstarter. They were looking to print 500 copies for $7600 (about $15 a game), and they've exceeded that goal.

It seems like this might be a way to fund indie game publishing. Donors get a good feeling for donating, and low-cost reward goodies, almost like an NPR fund drive, and the designers get to publish. For many of the donors, this Kickstart thing has been essentially just a way to pre-sell copies of the game, which is great.

However, before using these two data points as proof that the concept is generally workable, I've got a few concerns or questions:

• For Inevitable, $1350 of their contributions are from three people. I'd be interested in knowing if they'd be able to pull this off without these few angel contributors. For Gentlemen, it's not quite as focused on large donors - most of their donors have pledged $26 or $36 to get a copy of the game, while a small number (13) have pledged $150 or more. This small group makes up 25% of the total.
  
• For Inevitable, you have to donate $50 to get a real copy of the game. On a print run that small, with the components visible in the pictures, I doubt the cost of production is lower than $25 or $30 a game, maybe more. With the bigger print run in Gentlemen, they've apparently got lower costs, as you'd expect, but in each case, they don't have much of a margin.
  
• It looks like the Inevitable guys have a fairly active support group (e.g., they have 88 fans on Facebook) and have had a number of playtest events. For Gentlemen, they've gotten some support in the game media and from a faculty member (the creator is a grad student in design). My guess is that for each of these projects, many of their donors are friends and family, rather than random people they didn't know who happened to see the project on Kickstarter. If that's the case, then Kickstarter has provided only a framework for hitting up friends rather than a magical source of independent financing. It might not work if you haven't got friends, or if you don't do the networking legwork before listing on Kickstarter.
  
• As I said above, I don't think there's much of a margin in either of these projects for profit. It looks like the funding collected will go almost directly to manufacturing costs. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, of course - it's great to have your game printed up and played by hundreds of people - but that makes this a means to support a hobby, not a way to support yourself or a family as a "real" job.
  
• It also isn't a clear path to a broader print run or wider distribution. Again, not a problem at all - if your goal is getting some nice copies made, and getting it out there to your friends and acquaintances and maybe a few others, then it's a clear success. Just not a way to found a company. However, these seed projects could allow the authors to prove that their games have a market, and might allow them to recruit bigger investors or get a traditional publisher to pick up the games, or provide a foot in the door to publishing future works.
  

Anyway, a very interesting model, and apparently in these cases a very successful one. Congratulations to both the Inevitable and Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands projects, and good luck.