Current musical mood: Syayos’s Anthem 1.1.
Last November, on my RPG/Solo-play blog, I posted about setting limits on my crowdfunding this year. I simultaneously spent too much on campaigns but also kind of hit the goal (backed fewer, paid more for the ones I did back). A partial success, in other words.
A few brought instant joy and have maintained that energy.
A few others: exact opposite.
Most campaigns I backed had very mixed results as to their delivery this year. Some of it was very much on them. Some of it was on the vast ocean of international shipping changes and charges (and the double whammy of changes to charges).
Some of it was obvious business strategies to treat Kickstarter and Backerkit as a lower responsibility store front to keep pushing hype.
The long and short of it can be summed up as:
- I don’t need your extra crap designed to trigger FOMO
- It is generally cheaper for me to buy it at full retail through a shipper who can handle international shipping
This past June had me me paying €30 in customs fees for a £12 deck of cards. Not like a fancy deck of cards with handwritten unique and bespoke fonts. Just…a deck of cards with some branding. Kind of stuff you’d expect to be for a tenner.
I had one book show up and thanks to the jackasses handling shipping (€40 I spent on it, including fees being supposedly pre-paid) writing it out as a “gift” worth only $0.01 I had to pay an additional €40. That’s €80 extra for a €40 book.
It sours things.
Many of the small projects I like to back are frankly economically untenable for me to get any physical tier in their current forms. Some creators are leaning hard on POD and I like that when I can print it either in country or through companies who will take the fees up front so I don’t have to pay extra fees later.
Shipping can still be steep, and quality takes a hit, but it’s doable.
There are also plenty of upper/mid-tier projects. Those can be nice because I know the product will be good, the shipping will be handled, the add-ons will be of quality….and I can buy everything I want from those campaigns from a store without going through crowdfunding tomfoolery. It’s ironic that those are the best ones to back for customer satisfaction.
Which brings me to a third bullet point which I held back, and it’s the most damning one for my own continued participation:
- It is obvious that crowdfunding as a whole no longer aligns with my personal philosophy of what it means
This morning I got recommended a Youtube video with a name not quite but essentially: “Our Dream Is Dead.” I absolutely refuse to share any part of it [besides one graphic at the top of this post] but picture something like below for a thumbnail only he made himself up to look a bit like a clown (?) and slapped the word FAIL on it and you will get the point:
Over the video he goes on to explain a lot of things, mostly about how he is a great marketer for crowdfunding and how much he understands how to game Kickstarters and how, despite this, how much this dream campaign ultimately failed.
Dead, Space Pilgrims, dead in the water.
Screenshots of conversions and the lack thereof. Actively mentioning board game content creators for not being good marketing. Talking about Substacks and how to build marketing lists and, this cannot be stressed enough, how the man talking about a “failed” Kickstarter campaign knows how to market Kickstarter campaigns. All the while showing quality, PR-team-approved shots of the game in question.
wink, Space Pilgrims, wink
If you haven’t guessed the twist: the Kickstarter has actually fully funded within days of launching and still has 20+ days to go.
The video is marketing. How much is debatable. I feel like a lot but (see edit below) the creators are saying it was mostly accidental. There feels like some cynicism, here. It was not a “Day 3 and we are 70% there!” but “Day 3 and our studio is doomed.”
Marketing released before the campaign had succeeded but shown to me and many others after. Turning Kickstarter into GoFundMe but the thing on life support is the dream.
People trying to point this out in the comments are either being ignored or, in one case, having it explained to them how if a Kickstarter doesn’t fund in the first 24 hours it is a failure.
No matter how cynical this is, though, versus how honest: it really demonstrates how crowdfunding has long been digested and eaten by the exact same language it was meant to fix.
Pitting content creators against content enjoyers.
Thank you for helping to make it really clear to me how much I don’t care about participating in the guilting-customers into liking, sharing, subscribing, backing, and buying game.
Parasocial bullshit is destroying content creation more and more everyday.
To the rest of you, with only a couple of exceptions, I’ll see your stuff after it gets released and people come up with reviews that you didn’t pay them to write.
I hope it makes it. I truly do. I’m sure there is an audience out there somewhere for it.
Now I’m wondering how long until someone Kickstarts a campaign to market Kickstarter campaigns. Probably been done, hasn’t it?
EDIT/ADDITIONAL
Around the same time I was typing up my post someone else was calling them out for the “stunt” and the creator feedback actually makes the core issue sound much worse:
Third, we do not think we set [a dishonest] target; we set the minimum funding goal, which, of course, was expected to be surpassed quickly. If “funding goal” were the final objective for campaigns on Kickstarter these days, the campaigns would end once they reached it. But the algorithm here rewards those who raise 1000% of their minimum funding goal, ranking them higher. That explains why almost every campaign (regardless of their status and size) sets goals like this. Even in your list of backed projects, we can see many examples like these. They just succeeded in raising these “1000%,” so it is not presented to them as a sin. At least, we see it this way.
Even if this takes some disdain off the eyes of the creators, it just shows that this style of crowdfunding is a dead endeavor. Because people backing a project but not getting what they backed because the costs weren’t covered?
That’s a terrible practice.
I’m not giving the people who made the video a complete pass, though. I saw the video.