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> But we have literally no money whatsoever to pay for stamps, let alone print the artbooks and dvd-cases. How did this happen? Shouldn't that money have been

• dudul 11y ago
  Agreed. I don't understand how they can not give anything at all to all the people who poured money into their kickstarted. What does it say about crowdfunding?
  • coldpie 11y ago
    That contributing money to an unfinished product is a risk, and that you may never see the result you expected from your investment. Which is exactly what everyone should have known before contributing. Weighing a team's experience and ability should be a major factor in deciding whether to back a project.
  • micampe 11y ago
    It says that people don't understand what Kickstarter is: you are investing in a project, not buying a product. Investments carry risk.
    • dudul 11y ago
      True, but seriously the "we have everything ready in our basement but you can't get it cause we can't buy stamps" is f-ing lame. And as the previous poster mentioned, how do you not put this money aside to reward people who gave you money?
      • markus2012 11y ago
        I don't think it's lame. It sounds like they are living through a train-wreck moving in slow motion that will last a few months - and perhaps much longer.
    • s73v3r 11y ago
      You're not even investing, though. Investment implies a share of the company.
      • deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      • avalaunch 11y ago
        You're thinking of a very specific type of investment. Investment in the more generic form simply means putting in time, money, and/or effort in the hopes of some future reward. In this case, you're investing money in the hopes of a future reward that you preselected.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
• coldpie 11y ago
  I really wish software kickstarters would stop doing physical rewards. The logistics of manufacturing and shipping are non-trivial and are so outside of any software studio's wheelhouse.
  • IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    I'm not sure if it's true. It depends. Some stuff, for sure, like 3d printing tiny models of ingame characters, is something you can't just go out and do at scale without experience. But there's a lot of 'artbook' and 'wallpaper' and 'soundtrack' stuff. i.e. 100% of things that they already have. This project on its kickstarter already displayed lots of art and wallpaper material, and they launched the game obviously with a soundtrack. In short, shipping that is going to a local printer and asking to make a booklet or a wallpaper, in color. They give you a price and you inflate it by 10x. Wallpaper and booklet costs $3 to print, add a soundtrack and $3 in shipping (average, some will be 50c, some $5), and turn it into a +$25 reward. Get 1000 backers like that and you're netting close to $20k for relatively little effort. Even some ridiculous overhead and you still net $10k for stuff you can pay a highschooler a few hundred bucks to create. That $20k can pay a 3man passionate noodle eating team that's working on this parttime for months, and that's with a thousand backers, this team had a few thousand, actually I took a look and it seems that rewards are about half their campaign. It's really scrappy but it happens and it sometimes really works out. Definitely not something that works for every project, in fact I see it fail more often than not. But it's not a priori a bad idea, I just don't think everyone thinks it through. Some devs create games and then have a mini comic booklet as a reward that increases the price by $5, or hell just include it for free because hey, kickstarter. That requires writing, printing and shipping, the costs don't make sense at all.
    • s73v3r 11y ago
      I think generalizations like yours are why things like this fail.
      • IkmoIkmo 11y ago
        I didn't generalise, I gave an cherry picked example of a company that promised things they already had made (e.g. a wallpaper and soundtrack) and then said it's not always like that and so it depends, but it's not a priori a bad idea. The OP generalised by saying they wished game devs would simply never do merchandise all together, even though it looks like this project raised half its budget from rewards, and I think we both can guess they spent more than half of their time developing the game, and even though one can find examples where merchandise was successful. I also think you missed the point which is that they actually shipped the game, and made the merchandise. They just didn't end up selling enough and went bankrupt, preventing them from shipping the merchandise. If they'd earmarked the funds or actually sold as expected, none of this would be a problem. i.e. merchandise wasn't the source of their problems.
• marrs 11y ago
  You can allocate it as early as you like, but if you declare bankruptcy then all of your assets are seized. The administrator doesn't much care what you intended to spend them on, they are now going to your debtors.
• rdancer 11y ago
  The purpose of a company, any company, is to achieve some goals, and that means risking the company's capital, that is, investors' money. If your primary concern is to return the invested money undiminished, you'll be completely paralysed. The purpose of the campaign was to develop and ship a game. They have succeeded, and in the process went bankrupt. Which means they won't be able to even pay creditors, lest investors.
• rdancer 11y ago
  The purpose of a company, any company, is to achieve some goals, and that means risking the company's capital, that is, investors' money. If your primary concern is to return the invested money undiminished, you'll be completely paralysed. The purpose of the campaign was to develop and ship a game. They have succeeded, and in the process went bankrupt. Which means they won't be able to even pay creditors, lest investors.