And then there's the digital versions of all the physical products to go along with the physical. And then you have to open up essentially a second storefront during the pledge management phase. You have to manage the comments and concerns and bugs there. A little experimentation, a little getting access to the right tools, getting some new tools that no extant platform or management package has, mentally separating the projects so we're not clogging any one avenue with all-the-things, etc.Īs a fan and a customer, I didn't think a lot about the other side of the business, but consider that when an RPG company funds and sells a book on Kickstarter, that becomes a storefront for a little while. That, much more than pros/cons of any one platform or fees is the reason for our diversification of platforms. Taking some projects like ETU: Study Abroad and Flash Gordon: Moons of Mongo to Game On Tabletop, and doing the Super Powers Companion on our own site has allowed us the necessary runway space to keep our invigorated publishing schedule humming along. Pathfinder for Savage Worlds, Rifts: Atlantis, and the upcoming Holler: An Appalachian Apocalypse are MAJOR productions for a company our size, and they're all Kickstarters this calendar year.Īnd that's about right for Kickstarter's stated policy of open campaigns and fulfillment schedules, and about right for the extra effort it takes to run a Kickstarter. You'll see that we're as active as we've ever been on the site and will continue to be.

Heck, 'issues with kickstarter' isn't really high on the list either. I think if you polled folks in our industry about KS, too, that the fees aren't high on the list of issues with the site or the paradigm. Consider the cost to have custom code to recreate a lot of functionality that isn't available off-the-shelf, the server demands of a first day rush, the testing and the upkeep. Kickstarter fees aren't really high on the list of reasons to try self-hosted crowdfunding.

like they would in a pledge manager but give them access to ANY of our products that are in print versus only those products we can manually enter into a post KS-campaign management platform (that's not technically ON Kickstarter itself anyway).

So it's a natural fit to allow folks to take advantage of shipping savings, etc. We're still on KS as much as we ever have been, so it's not at all a move away from that platform.Ĭonsider that we have DECADES worth of a back catalogue and that a lot of those products continue to sell well, and the best place to get those is on our webstore. It's more of an all-of-the-above or multi-platform strategy than anything against Kickstarter or any other platform. The main reason we're adding a self-hosted crowdfunding option to our toolbox is that it better allows us to meet the wants of our customers in a market that is changing.

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