Kickstarter

[Trenloe]

Lots and lots of established companies use Kickstarter for many reasons - to feel out the market, to use the marketing and momentum that a successful campaign can give, to provide funding for development, to engage users and get their feedback, etc.. Kickstarter has gone way beyond its original roots of helping small/fledgling companies "kickstart" a project. Many companies just use it as a pre-order platform, many more will use it for the reasons mentioned in this thread. A massive company like Philips even crowd funded a projector on Indiegogo. It's interesting having a negative viewpoint of an established company running a Kickstarter. I think "kickstart" has long fallen by the wayside, and this is purely and simply crowd funding of a project - the more people who back it, the more of that product will be produced. Kickstarter's charter (from their website) "Kickstarter’s mission is to help bring creative projects to life." That's exactly what SmiteWorks are doing here - bringing a creative project to life. If the funding goal wasn't reached, then that's a clear indication from the marketplace that it would be a risk for SmiteWorks to develop this project, funding all of the up front development costs (and licenses) themselves as it wouldn't be a popular ruleset and sales would be low. But, as the Kickstarter has funded quickly and is going well, it allows SmiteWorks to get the funding for the development and get a good quality product, and additions, into the hands of the end users.

[anstett]

Along these lines but on a tangent I do purchase modules, maps, etc. here in the Store that I am only somewhat likely to use, if at all. I do that to show support for the people converting for smaller rule sets (2E and Traveller) and hope that spurs them to convert more and add to my resources.

Of course I am also hording just in case for that day when my travellers decide to go 200 parsecs in a totally random direction than what I had planned.

[ddavison]

I appreciate you sharing your perspective. As many have already commented, we see the reasoning behind this Kickstarter to be many fold.

Risk Assessment
Ever since I've run the company in 2009, we have generally performed an internal risk assessment on what would sell before deciding what to develop. For that entire time, there have always been items we did not choose to develop or we have on a list and simply have not gotten to. That list continues to grow and new RPG systems continue to release at a pace faster than we can accommodate. Our community developers help us tackle many of these, but there is still a strong demand for rulesets and products that we do internally. Some of our choices for development have turned out well and some of them have failed. As a very recent example, the Dune ruleset has had very poor sales and it was a substantial loss. The market simply was not there for that product. In other cases, rulesets that we are very proud of have failed to reach an audience outside of the established FG community.

Outreach
Fantasy Grounds has a little over 400K people who have at one time or another signed up on the forums or purchased a license. D&D Beyond, by comparison, has 15M people. Roll20 is somewhere in the same ballpark. We still see cases where people have evidently never heard of Fantasy Grounds. Our community is possibly more insular, and they don't seem to spend as much time proselytizing the system on general gaming forums and communities. Kickstarter is very visible and expands our reach.

Advertising
A common refrain we hear is that we should just advertise more. We have been doing this for the last few months and even for this Kickstarter campaign. The advertising costs for Werewolf along with the costs for the video creation will likely be more than the original funding goal. Advertising and creative ad work is not cheap.

Learning from the Success of Others
Many of our partners have had great success using Kickstarter to run every project they produce.
Kobold Press is running a campaign that hit $151k with 24 days to go.
Castles & Crusades is running one that hit $40K with 27 days to go.
Free League is running a One Ring campaign that hit $960K with 4 days to go.

Almost every week or two we help one of our partners promote their Kickstarter campaign. We think it is probably long overdue that we learn from their success. Werewolf is almost a presale situation for us because we had already committed to do it. It let's us test the waters a bit and see if this pattern will work for us going forward. As I write this, the campaign has raised $8K. I doubt that we would have seen anywhere near that amount of funding if we simply released Werewolf into our store with our normal methods of adding it to the newsletter, social media, and the forums. We will need to find a way to minimize our campaign costs, but I think this is proving to be a method that will work for us. It won't be every project we produce, but it will be focused on projects that are either a) unsure of the market or b) properties that we think need greater outreach.

Lagging Sales
D&D was the flagship product line for us ever since we signed on as official partners. It is still pretty dominant, but the appetite for D&D has dramatically decreased. In some cases, this loss of demand seems to flow across into other products and also into our core license sales. We still work with them and with all of our other RPG partners, but providing better sales volume for us and those other RPG partners is becoming more and more important. A successful Kickstarter that we run will be good for our partner and good for us to help compensate for the drop in D&D sales.

[Egheal]

I won't participate in that kickstarter because I don't play this line of products but it seems to me that it is a nice way to get funds and to pay the developers. I would fully participate in a kickstarter for the Blade Runner RPG for example just saying...

[Lo Zeno]

I see from the posts in this thread that there are, and I knew there would be, valid reasons for this kickstarter. I guess I still hold the idea that kickstarters are aimed at getting small developers needed funds to complete a project.

To be fair, Kickstarter started (heh) out like that; but it's been ages since that time: as someone who pledged to an unhealthy number of kickstarters I can assure you that nowadays only a relatively small number of kickstarter projects are aimed at getting small developers the funds for a brilliant idea. The majority of kickstarter projects now, especially the big popular ones, are used as a way to assess the viability of a project, to make sure it will prove to be a profit.

[malvok]

Once again, thanks everyone for bringing me up to speed about the use of kickstarter. I haven't kept up with kickstarter in ages. Thanks Doug, for that thorough explanation, I appreciate it.

[arkanis]

Lagging Sales
D&D was the flagship product line for us ever since we signed on as official partners. It is still pretty dominant, but the appetite for D&D has dramatically decreased. In some cases, this loss of demand seems to flow across into other products and also into our core license sales. We still work with them and with all of our other RPG partners, but providing better sales volume for us and those other RPG partners is becoming more and more important. A successful Kickstarter that we run will be good for our partner and good for us to help compensate for the drop in D&D sales.

Sad to hear that, because it's not an smiteworks fault, but as an avid DND consumer I must say that the latest products released by WotC range from the forgivable (Wild beyond Witchlight), the lame (wildemount) and the outright awful (adquisitions incorporated)

[deer_buster]

I see kickstarters as a measuring stick of interest. Get enough interest and the project progresses (in most cases...I've seen kickstarters fail even after far exceeding their goals). The key here is that Smiteworks is a reputable company with the expertise and integrity to deliver a quality product if enough interest warrants their investment of time into the project. I consider their kickstarters as a pre-sale...and look forward to them submitting more projects of this nature in the future, even if I am not particularly interested in this IP at this particular time.

[Nylanfs]

It should also be mentioned that Smiteworks also talked about this in 2013.

[mdrichey]

Lagging Sales
D&D was the flagship product line for us ever since we signed on as official partners. It is still pretty dominant, but the appetite for D&D has dramatically decreased. In some cases, this loss of demand seems to flow across into other products and also into our core license sales. We still work with them and with all of our other RPG partners, but providing better sales volume for us and those other RPG partners is becoming more and more important. A successful Kickstarter that we run will be good for our partner and good for us to help compensate for the drop in D&D sales.

Surprising. I thought D&D was more popular than ever.