Hi!
This post is a reflection about our last Kickstarter and the possible reasons of its failure, written both to help us understanding what went wrong and to possibly collect your feedback, thoughts and suggestions.
Going straight to the point, we think that the main reason we failed was due to our incapacity to see a big change that has affected the hobby of miniature gaming in three years from our first successful Kickstarter for the undead war fleet: 3D printing.
When we devised the ICE, LIGHTNING & FIRE Kickstarter for our three fantasy war fleet we thought that having physical resin model cast in resin was still something our potential pledgers would appreciate and were also ready to pay for, and for this reason we didn’t worried too much about the high cost of resin casting and its consequences on pledge levels.
But we were wrong.
During the campaign, one of the pledgers of our first Kickstarter (thank you!) and other people pointed out that while the warships were OK, the market for such niche models is expecting to be able to buy digital files (STL) and print them autonomously on the now ubiquitous 3D printers.
Looking at the other on-going Kickstarter campaigns in the same period when our one was online, a very high percentage of them were indeed offering very good-looking miniatures in STL format.
Despite this late realization we left the Kickstarter live for its entire planned period, registering a good number of people that were observing the campaign, meaning that there was interest in what we were offering, but with only a few observers converting into real pledgers by the end of the campaign.
This, added to the undoubted advantages that selling STL brings in, like zero costs on casting and shipping, possibly being faster in creating more models, and leaving the buyers to print the models at any scale they desire, has convinced us that the correct way to proceed is trying to offer digital models after having all our current warship translated into that format.
All the above to say that we will try to be back with a new Kickstarter, the format that seems to better fit our purposes, offering low cost digital files of our war fleets for personal use only, in the hope to generate enough interest to continue with our GRAVETIDES project, that aims to create never-seen-before fantasy naval fleets with their gaming rules.
The final answer is: what’s your opinion on this?
Are our conclusions sounding or you see other reasons of our failure that still defy us?
Thanks for taking the time to read all this, your feedback will be really appreciated.
Stay tuned.