>>98648672
I wanted to ask what sort of moron keeps doing clear KS scams without even changing the name of the company, but then again it seems to be working out well for him

>>98648708
I'm honestly impressed that there seems to be no legal mechanism to handle this and the platforms don't question it.

>>98648724
>I'm honestly impressed that there seems to be no legal mechanism to handle this and the platforms don't question it.
The platforms make money off of it no matter what so they don't give a shit, and they make it very clear that you're donating towards a cause and not buying a product. If you fall for one of these scams it's honestly your own fault and you deserve to lose all your money.

>>98648766
This one got pushed by a shit ton of content creators and websites, I think it may have scammed ontabletop, minwargaming and even archeon studios got sucked into one of them IIRC.

>>98648672
>LazySquire

It's in the name

I'm sorry but anyone that does Kickstarters deserves to be scammed. It's peak treatlerism. You do not need 200 miniatures at once.

The only annoying thing is that sometimes I see stuff I almost wouldn't mind, but why would I pay RRP for like 60% of the game when the rest was "stretch goals"

I Kickstarted one thing in my life, and it was Shadow of the Weird Wizard. The amount of content I got in return more than paid for the pre-order already, and I only took the risk because I knew the creator already made good on his previous project.

>>98650980
I'm glad someone else pointed this out.

>>98648724
Kickstarter is all about people tossing money in and hoping they get something back, there's no legal requirement for them to actually produce anything. Most litigation involving Kickstarter is on the back end, where the people running the kickstarter cut a check to someone to make a game and they mismanage the funds, in which case it's the kickstarter suing someone else to maybe recover funds to continue the kickstarter, the people who backed it never seeing a cent.

>>98652193
Kickstarted OSE Classic set and Mothership deluxe set and I'm happy with both. But if I do a KS one day and it hits lifechanging money (300,000+) I sure as hell won't fulfill.

>>98656197
Why not just set the margin on your KS high enough to make money? If you can sculpt it shouldn't be hard to get a quote from renedra and price it in
. I don't know how this shit fails, instead of using 3rd worlders just pay renedra

>>98651007
>It's peak treatlerism.
>How dare people fund things they wish to see made, that's just like being a Nazi!
Oh, fuck off bunkerboy

>>98657445
Kickstarter creation is sort of weird voodoo. You want a price that's low enough that it gets funded as fast as possible, because if its funded fast it'll get on the front page and get a massive boost. It may be hard to believe (and it might be less so than ten year ago) but there are people that just browse KS as a platform, and fund shit that gets recommended to them.

You also, as a KS creator, want to have stretch goals so people have a reason to keep funding, but you have to weigh the eventual cost of the stretch goals against how much money you are going to make. People have proven to be very, very bad at this.

Customers are also idiots, they get pissed at things like "wait, what do you mean you're going to pay yourself for your work! I just want to buy a board game, not fund your yacht," or some stupid bullshit like that.

Personally, I would never fund a Kickstarter for something like a boardgame, card game, or minis, especially from a new creator, and especially if they have a shitload of physical rewards in their stretch goals. I think the next big crash and burn is gonna be that Space King ks, no way that thing is gonna be on time, it is ships at all

>>98657881
So its an artifact of the algorithm of the platforms?

I have always wondered because its not like this is voodoo. You just email one of the injection molding companies, get a quote on cost to die a mold and a quote on modifying digital sculpts to fit the mold and you are done. You know it is probably 20-30K in tooling for the aluminum prototype and then production dies and the spot price for polystyrene per sprue. The engineer to take the STL and fix it will probably need a week of work time and thats maybe $5,000.

Something like a Bandai kit with multiple sprues and complex geometry will be 75K. The only way I see an honest way to fail is when the sculpt is difficult to cast and you have to keep doing revisions of test molds to prevent undercuts and stuff and piss away all your margin. I think this is how Wargames factory and Wargames Atlantic have fucked up their stuff before.

>>98657881
Space King has alternate revenue streams; I doubt it will crash and burn without severe mismanagement.

>>98658044
That's only a fraction of what it takes to get a product to market.

>>98658204
It might not tank them as a company, but my guess is that they ship years late, if it all, and if they do, it will probably end up costing them money.

>>98658044
Somewhat an artifact of the algorithm, somewhat the fact that most of the people who launch a Kickstarter don't know what the fuck they are doing.

>>98658210
The crowd sourcing has done everything else though. Get your crate from the molding company put six sprues from the crate in a chap packing bag and mail it out. You don't need boxes or anything. Etsy stores by old ladies could handle it. I think $100,000 in donations could handle a kit and still make you money if you were the labor/sculptor. Worst you break even but have a successful reputation and charge more on the next bespoke kit.

>>98657881
Kind of a mixed bag. I helped kickstart the Kingdom Death boardgame and that went really well. It was a great product but all the minis languish in my Pile of Shame, right along with the 1.5 and a bazillion add ons. At the same time, I got burned by this one game designer who had some history of designing games that made it to market. What I didn't know at the time I hopped on board was this dude was tied up in a legal battle with a publisher. I forget what the details were but the judge put a freeze on the product and it wasn't delivered until years later -only because another publisher picked it up and decided to honor the kickstarter --by then, I had stopped checking in, so I never got a copy. I heard it was pretty mid though. Then there was that time I backed the Macross/Robotech war game. I only threw in for a couple of models and they never sent those out to me. Shame, that one, I just wanted them for Battletech (lel)
I don't know if it's still a problem, but years ago I heard that people were making fake pledges to push up on the stretch goals, then reversing charges on a successful campaign.

>>98658298
So, you make 100000 dollars on Kickstarter. This is actually probably closer to 70000 dollars, because Kickstarter takes a cut, and the credit card processors take a cut (my understanding is that this is about 1/3, it might have changed.) This, right here, will fuck a lot of first time KS because they aren't anticipating it.

Then you've got shipping. If you're doing it yourself, like you're describing, that means you're getting a lot of product shipped to your physical house, and then you're shipping it yourself. Shipping, especially international shipping, is both costly *and* volatile. So, there is a good chance that between successfully kick-starting your project, and fulfilling your project, shipping rates have gone up.

There's also a lot of weird tariff and customs inspection stuff. I know of one rpg Kickstarter that almost got derailed because the customs guy thought it needed to be labeled as a "toy" and there was a bunch of extra inspection shit that needed to get done because of the "toy" label. It all came down to the whim of some customs guy. Shit like that can happen. Now you have to pay to make sure your minis don't have fucking uranium in them or something. Also, probably, you're going to want to pay yourself, and anyone else that does work for you.

100000 dollars seems like a lot, but there's a lot, a LOT of back end shit that needs to get done, that you *have* to do above board. You're not doing Chinese recasts in your garage.

>>98658750
I know, But I am assuming if you actually put in the effort to sculpt the product and go on kick-starter you would reach out to the firm you were planning to employ, get a quote, get your international shipping quotes budget in the margin you need for surprises and what you expect in personal labor compensation.


I have other hobbies and I have seen groups crowd fund people getting cities permits to launch expeditions to import rare fish including war torn Africa with less drama. Like central Africans collecting fish are more trustworthy than nerds.

>>98658768
Again, it's not a matter of trustworthy, it's a matter of incompetence. These people aren't buying yachts with Kickstarter money instead of fulfilling, the cost of shipping and plastic has gone up since your Kickstarter finished, the first batch of sprues that came off the line are fucked so we have to redo them, the customs guy in the EU just informed you you need to get a test done on your plastics that's going to cost 10 grand if you want to fulfill your European orders, and the best margin on casting you got was a factory in Chengdu who will get around to your job "at some point." It's a many headed, constantly shifting beast. Not to say there aren't scammers out there, they are, but far more usually it's just that the people who design games aren't also incredible businessmen, in general.

>>98658750
Kickstarter will take 5% of the gross funds. Credit card fees will be 3%. Where many companies get it wrong is estimating the shipping cost. If you do that wrong there goes your entire profit margin and its on every single order.
This is what happened to Dark Souls

>working for glowies
Ohhh, so it's a front to funnel n clean black budget money. Make enough fake board games and each is miniscule enough that most who aren't bots will take the L on their $80 while the $8000 whale is actually the backdoor buddy.

>>98658908
It's also how chaosium almost went out of business

It's in the name, Lazy.

Speaking as someone who funded the Blacklist Miniatures Kickstarter that I didn't get for 3 years and had to pay an extra 20 bucks for (still very much worth it), I still say: based. If you don't learn the history of a company before backing something, you deserve it. If anything, the fact that this guy did it under the same company name, completely exonerates him from any legal action in my eyes.

>>98660761
>It's in the name, Lazy.
I find it amazing that he does it twice a year and gets like 500,00k on average every time