Orkpiraten

Kickstarter Retrospective

Back in december 2017 I summed up a bit of my crowdfunding experience. Since then, the number of campaigns I contributed to has about doubled, and of course, the delayed, failed or otherwise troubled projects have added up…

Let’s start with the really bad ones, the ones I’d label actual scams in hindsight:

• Spinward Traveller: What I wrote back in 2017 is still true. There was a brief flicker of life since then, but that doesn’t change anything.
• Zen Blanket: Yeah, this was me being stupid. ‚Nuff said.

Then there are the outright failures, where I assume people put an effort in but went about in a naive or incompetent way:

• The Pulse Dice: First timer dealing with overseas manufacturers and failing. That stuff just happens.
• Webcam privacy cover: I’m still not convinced this wasn’t a scam. Could’ve been, could’ve been someone being way in over their head and then cutting their losses. They probably were facing the decision to either fulfill and make losses or not fulfill and keep some profit, and then taking the profitable way out..
• Rite Press: There are a lot of comparable french presses available, but this one promised the gimmick of having a removable bottom to easily get the grounds out. I think the creator really planned to deliver, then faced quality control issues and now has a stupid mess on their hand.

Of course, there are a bunch of projects that got delayed, but where I am still mostly hopeful that things will work out eventually. They come down into two categories, those with good communication about things, and those with, well, bad to nonexisting communication. Let’s start with those that have really good communication:

• Iron Harvest: Creating computer games is hard, and prone to a lot of failures. These people put in the work, keep everyone updated with excellent and in-depth information and also provided a pretty good beta version of the game too!
• Reigns

Of course, there are a lot of projects that have too infrequent or outright bad communication:

• Cartel, a game of mexican narcofiction: This is a heartbreaker game, and the playtest material already looks gorgeous. But it being a heartbreaker means lots of delays, as the writing takes ages, and the author isn’t the best communicator either. Still, I’m hopeful.
• Flying Circus: Another heartbreaker RPG, and it suffers from the same thing: The creator has high standards and little time, nor the planning capacity (in time and effort, not intellect) to have a proper timeline… 
• Velvet Generation RPG: A rewrite of an existing RPG, which seemed straightforward enough, but then got stuck in development hell. Add only sporadic updates, and you get a project that will probably deliver… eventually. Who knows when though.
• Record of Dragon War RPG: This is a tricky one: I know most of the people involved personally and trust them not to cheat or scam anyone. But this project had to weather a company going bankrupt, a buy-out by a company owned by a japanese-owned corporation, which then merged with a large US one. All of which has lots of behind-the-scenes things that are way above the paygrade of this crowdfunding campaign and thus doesn’t get communicated in updates. I still have hopes, but boy, I have no idea when this will deliver at all. 
• Grey Cells RPG: A lot of this has delivered in forms of pre-release PDFs, but there is still a lot missing and only sporadic communication about things. Which is a pity, really.. 
• Satanic Panic RPG: Here you can see what happens to an RPG project when the main author has to pay their bills by.. taking on more RPG projects. And then disappears into them. The lesson here kids? Don’t take on crowdfunding as your main source of income, you’ll end up juggling a lot of plates… 
• Seance and Sensibility: This is sort of good, but could have been better. Still, I got the PDFs at least already.

And then there are those projects, where I completely lost faith in them delivering anything, even though it might still happen, the creatores are still occasionally clamining some sort of progress:

• The Obsidian 3D Printer: When I backed this, I had done all the due diligence work: There were good reviews of the demo machine by 3^rd parties, they already successfully delivered another 3D printer through crowdfunding, the reviews for that one were favourable, and they stated that they were good to go. Then they fell out with their main engineer, lost the rights to the machine as it were and spiralled downwards from there on, with only the barest and most superficial of updates. I don’t think anyone wanted to scam the backers here, but this is a case of marketing people failing at hardware. Hard. 
• Making Waves — teaching refugees to build a boat. To be honest, I am happy with what has been done with this so far: A bunch of refugees got to learn how to built a small sports yacht from scratch. Having a launch party at some point would have been a nice extra, but really, I wasn’t backing it for the party here.

Some campaigns have actually delivered, but in a way where I don’t think that they kept their promises:

• MagNeo Adapter: I mentioned this in the comments to the last article, nothing more to add here.
• Lima, the brain of your devices: It worked. Sort of. By the time it arrived, it was too slow, too underpowered and relied way too much on central cloud services to actually be useful. I gave it away for small change on ebay in the end.
• Snore Circle — anti snoring eye mask: The good thing about this? It was cheap, and is a decent enough sleep mask. The anti-snoring gizmo and the app that was supposed to control it? Well, it got delivered, but it didn’t do anything even remotely effective or noticeable. 
• Enclave ANC headphones: They work. But not perfectly so, and weren’t the most comfortable ones. Again, I gave them away for peanutes on ebay. 

There are a bunch of projects that actually delivered since I started writing this post. All of these have sent me things that are about as good as promised.

• Fiasco, the game of things going wrong: This is a reprint, where they adapted the core game mechanics to use playing cards. An eminently good idea for this game, and the package is great. They’ve delivered the digital versions of everything ahread, but logistics and other things delayed delivery. Great game, great update, good communications!
• the Dun travel pack: Ah, another bag, because I don’t have enough. (Seriously, I may have a problem. I am STILL looking for the perfect backpack / daily commute bag). This one was supposed to arrive by christmas, but they apparently had quality issues with a component, and when they figured it out, their supplier dropped out in favour of a bigger contract. That happens, and they communicated things well. The backpack is neat, although who knows when I’ll travel again…
• A workshop game book: Just so slightly delayed, but the reasons are communicated nicely. Good job!
• Spyra, the fancy water gun: They had a truly overambitious delivery date and rightly moved that to „spring“ this year. They overcommunicated these things in a good way, and already have the first 160 production samples in their office. This is how you do this! (Also, the water gun is truly overengineered and cool)
• Inhuman Condition - a game of cops and robots: This is apparently already fulfilling in the US, and should start soon in the EU. As this is a board game with a bunch of slightly fancy components, delays were kinda unavoidable, but they were still nicely communicated. And they told their backers about tariffs, printing woes, conventions and so on, all useful and interesting information! The box is beautiful and I love it.
• The Ultraviolet Grasslands: A high concept RPG, mostly developed through a Patreon. The people behind this shared every step of the way, telling the backers when art got submitted, what was missing, why work halted at some point, showed progress pictures and sent out PDFs with intermediate material. At no point were I left in any doubt whether things will be fulfilled, even with the delays that happened. This is an excellent game book, you should buy it!
• X-Bows mechanical ergonomic keyboard: Before I had a luggage/bag habit, I had a keyboard habit. This project is an excellent example how people underestimated hardware development, especially when it comes to magnetic connectors. And at times, the updates were not as information-dense as I’d liked to have them, but they were there and let us know what happened. The keyboards are mechanically gorgeous, but the software is sorely lacking.
• The Rainsaber: Nifty concept, and I truly believe that Ben wants to deliver, but boy does the man have bad communication skills and at this point, I don’t know if he’ll ever deliver. I am very close to formally requesting a refund here.. I got the saber by now, and it is as promised! And to be fair, Ben did throw in a lot of extra parts into the package because I told him of eventually putting together a „Darth Poppins“ cosplay.
• Turbo-Killer short movie: The trailer and concept art were so gorgeous, I had to back this. The backer communication was mostly very good, although there was a stretch of silence in the middle. Still, at no point did this feel like a scam, but always more like „ok, they have shit to do that is outside of this, so give them a break!“. Sadly though they kinda dropped the ball towards the end of the campaign, mostly because the movie rights got bought up by Shudder and that apparently made everything harder? Still, I got the Blu-Ray and all.

Final tally:

• 5 out of 160 projects are complete failures or scams
• 4 got delivered, but in a quality that should probably still qualify as failures.
• 7 open with bad comms
• 1 open with good comms