I haven’t played Eminent Domain, but this Chris Farrell blog post has some good thoughts about the potential negative effects of Kickstarter. The tldr is that ideas that sound good on paper can now bypass the traditional gatekeepers who would have forced the development needed to push a game from mediocre to great.
I think you can make the claim that the traditional gatekeepers haven’t always done a sterling job of that anyway, but I definitely see where he’s coming from – it prizes good concepts over good execution in a way that non-preorder-based models are less likely to do.
Definitely, and I don’t want to rain on your parade. You’re not getting ripped off at that price and the art/components look excellent. I just looked at it and thought of a lot of other games I’d rather drop $45 on that were known quantities.
I’m also feeling a little buyer’s remorse for purchasing the iOS version of Elder Sign. I was hoping for a light Arkham Horror, and instead got a Cthulhu-themed reskin of Go Fish. :(
Be glad you didn’t buy the board game, which is insanely pricey for a dumb dice game. It’s like every one of Fantasy Flight’s weak points bundled into a single box.
That said, I enjoy the iOS version. It’s Yahtzee in Cthulhu clothing, but far more streamlined than the fiddly cardboard disaster, so I’ve enjoyed it for what it is.
It’s a fair point about the quality of execution in Kickstarter projects being something of a crapshoot, but on the other side of the coin, the boardgame industry has grown so insular that there really aren’t any gatekeepers any more, simply because there aren’t any gates. With very, very few exceptions (that pretty much all involve knowing somebody in the industry), an indie developer’s options for getting a project published these days are: 1) There aren’t any. Almost all of the major publishers don’t even accept design submissions, and develop everything in house.
Kickstarter is inarguably going to allow some crappy products that would not otherwise have been published to get published. But I think that it’s a lot like the iTunes App Store in that it also has the potential to provide an outlet for good game concepts that might otherwise never have seen the light of day. On balance, I’m a fan of Kickstarter.
I love reading Farell’s stuff even though I disagree with 80% of it. I think he’s dead wrong that Eminent Domain is boring. It’s not the best deck builder I’ve played, but it’s probably the easiest to teach and plays quickly, so it has a valuable spot in my collection. It’s also a bit more nuanced than Farell gives it credit for, and I don’t see any major holes in the design that would have forced a traditional publisher to reject it. They even made it available as a print-and-play before putting it into production, so it was very easy to get a read on without blindly buying into Kickstarter hype. It is also obvious that the game was designed with expansions in mind to flesh it out a bit more, but it plays fine out of the box.
Kickstarter works great for board games. I can’t think of a single instance where a truly crap game got funded, and even if it happened people are still getting precisely what they paid for. Yes, risk is shifted from the publisher to the customer, but if customers willingly shoulder that risk I don’t see what the problem is. Any problems on that end are mitigated by the fact that anything driving preorders is a tremendous boon to the board game industry. Prices per unit fall substantially as your print run increases, and locking in preorders this way helps companies avoid sitting on a ton of unsold stock from misjudging the market.
The only aspect of Kickstarter I’ve hated so far are the ego-maniacal, self-entitled backers who care more about obtaining exclusives they can rub in other people’s faces than they do about the company they’re ostensibly supporting. Some D-Day Dice backers are whining for more stretch rewards since the company blew through their upper target, and there was much gnashing of teeth when Tasty Minstrel sold copies of Eminent Domain to GenCon attendees before shipping the Kickstarter orders. This obsession with stuff that’s meaningless in the long term, or that would benefit them at the publisher’s expense, drives me nuts.
Yeah, I actually like Eminent Domain a great deal but that last one made me unsubscribe. KOAAS just isn’t my kind of game, and the way it was marketed from the outset was irritating. That email was the last straw, especially considering he should be working on making me forget the aeons of fuckups with ED’s delivery date, which by the way sounded like the Stonehenge set design procedure from Spinal Tap.
Kickstarter will not be the death of traditional gatekeepers in the industry any more than iphone games are the end of traditional gaming. But it would be wise for people moving between worlds like Mindes to keep a very clear eye on the nature of their relationship with customers. It’s still business, and if you want to treat it like a livejournal there’s going to be potential for backlash.
Lorini
4186
I guess if you are talking about Hasbro or Fantasy Flight that might be true, but Zev of Zman Games and Jay Tummelson of Rio Grande games go to cons specifically to see prototypes and welcome them. Jay was even running a design contest for a while but the logistics got to be too much. My son’s design wasn’t accepted but he got a lot of good feedback during the contest. Neither of these companies have in house developers either. If you don’t have your heart set on being the next designer of Monopoly there are plenty of opportunities if you will take them. I don’t back Kickstarter projects because what I see is a lot of drek. If the game is good, it will be picked up by a mainstream publisher and at that time I will pre-order it and be on my merry way. I don’t get the little trinkets or whatever but I really don’t care about those.
In fairness, my point is a little more nuanced than that. Risk is shifted from the producer to the customer; that’s not inherently a problem, and for a lot of niche stuff that may be the only way to get the project done.
But customers need to recognize it gives the producer a ton of bad incentives. They’ve already got your money. It may be in their interest to keep quality high for the long-term health of their brand, but what if they put the project on Kickstarter before the game was completely finalized, and they ran into a significant gameplay problem which they can’t immediately satisfactorily resolve. Are they going to say “hey, sorry, we ran into a problem, here’s your money back”, or are they going to say “hey, close enough, ship it!”. Plenty of people are mindful of their reputation and going to do their best. But plenty of people are going to do the latter also.
This is not a plea to avoid Kickstarter, or whatever. There are plenty of projects that deserve funding, and for whom Kickstarter may present the best option. It’s just to be aware of both the risks and the potentially hugely problematic incentives Kickstarter creates for publishers. They’re people too, and when presented with a choice between taking the money and doing the right thing, they’re not going to be any different than anyone else.
I would also mention that outlets for budding game designers are certainly available. Matt Leacock, a friend of ours, was a complete unknown before he published Pandemic just a few years back. As noted both Z-Man and Rio Grande publish a number of games each year by designers with no credits, as do European publishers. Sure, it’s a tough row to hoe. It requires legwork, going to cons and meeting people, demoing your game for anyone who will play it, building up word of mouth and a reputation, making personal connections, knowing who’s receptive (Z-Man) and who’s not (Days of Wonder), making artistic compromises, and just plain being very good at what you do … but that’s just like every other creative endeavor.
This is hardly the first time that’s happened, but I still find it a little unreal whenever it does.
I think that’s a strong argument against preordering a new title from game developers that haven’t earned your trust, but it’s not particular to Kickstarter.
Anyone else weigh in on this?
jpinard
4191
Lorini, we have a very small house and we’re going to be board gaming in the living room. We even took our dining room table down (disassembled it) because we needed the space. So that makes a folding table a necessity.
So higher table is better? Funny, I thought people would have said lower so they can hoard over the board from their chairs.
I like 51st state a lot, but it’s an odd game. It’s sort of a hybrid of a game like Glory to Rome along with a resource-engine game reminiscent of Roads and Boats or something where you build factories with increasing production.
All the cards are useable three ways, either as buildings with various powers, conquests which give big one-off resource payoffs, or treaties that give more modest recurring revenue. From there it’s a game of blending your resource requirements with special powers from buildings.
It’s definitely quirky and not easily accessible; it’s of Polish small-press origin, and the iconography can be baffling. But it plays well, and if you’re a fan of San Juan, Race for the Galaxy, and Glory to Rome, it’s definitely worth checking out.
I haven’t played the second game using the same system (New Era), but it adds inter-player conflict, which is not to many people’s liking.
Rebutted by Chris Farrell! Thanks for your comments, and for your writing throughout the years, which I have enjoyed immensely. As mentioned, I don’t always agree with your conclusions (80% was hyperbole), but your points are always well-reasoned and thought-provoking.
Your point about incentives is true, but I haven’t noticed it as a real problem so far and don’t expect it will become one beyond isolated incidents. The most successful projects are ones that provide lots of information, including rules or (in the case of D-Day Dice, for example) print-and-play versions that let you see for yourself if the game is a dud.
The new has also worn off Kickstarter to a large extent, and people’s expectations seem to have risen dramatically. It takes a solid idea with smart marketing to get much attention, and it would be difficult for a publisher to pull off the scenario you describe. Not impossible, certainly, but it seems fairly easy to smell a rat or a sniff out a crap product there. I think expecting “plenty” of people to do it is a bit of a stretch, particularly in the board game market where the customers are pretty savvy and likely won’t be enthusiastic about anything that doesn’t have the rules locked down before it is posted.
I bought a bar-height table (two of them, actually), and hated them so badly I gave away the chairs and sawed the table legs down to normal height. Sitting that high up for long periods is uncomfortable for a lot of people, and it looked ridiculous in my game room. Sitting with your feet on the floor is much better for board gaming, at least for me.
Picked up the Road to Canterbury among a few other titles today, and it’s definitely one of the most aesthetically impressive games I’ve seen in a long time. I hope the gameplay lives up to the presentation, but it occurred to me how Biblios could have benefited from a less shiny/modern look and more of this.
Also videos. Lengthy videos of the game being played is a good way to make me a lot more spendy with my money.
Chris: I agree with your points, above, and I certainly would urge a healthy “caveat emptor” attitude when backing a Kickstarter project. That said, I can’t imagine that any developer would be able to get away with a “just ship it” attitude more than, say, once. The boardgaming community is is pretty tightly connected, and word of that sort of thing tends to get around.
As others have said, that’s not really endemic to Kickstarter. In the worst case, it’s equivalent to pre-ordering a game from a “major” publisher. But it seems a lot more common (at least from the projects that interest me) to give consumers more info than they’d get from publishers.
Where it falls apart is with stuff like the Miskatonic School for Girls project, which still bugs me because it seems like a cool concept handled badly. It’s pretty clear they intended to publish the game no matter what, so Kickstarter wasn’t making the game possible, just funding the game before it was finished. And making the rules of the game available to backers only is just unforgivable, IMO, a complete violation of what Kickstarter’s supposed to be about. (They made the rules publicly available later, but by that point I’d already lost interest).
And as for Eminent Domain: singling that game out as an example of what’s wrong with Kickstarter is a weird choice, both because of all the preview material that was provided as Tracy mentioned; and because it feels more like a game from a bigger publisher than any other Kickstarter board game project I’ve seen.
In particular, it feels to me like a Days of Wonder game: beautiful presentation, easy to get into and engaging, but then ultimately feels like something’s missing to keep it from being more substantial. I still like it a lot, partly for the things listed as faults in that post. I wanted a more streamlined and accessible version of Race for the Galaxy, without the unnecessarily complicated Trade rules that I STILL can’t explain to new players. It’s something that’s too much of a “me too” game to be picked up by a bigger publisher, but it’s exactly what I wanted.
(The only complaint that I’ll agree with entirely is that it’s too difficult to change strategy mid-game, since you’ve got a lot of cards that everybody has to choose, and no efficient way to cull cards from your deck).
Yeah, there are definitely ways for the little guy to get published. For example, a friend of mine just got this published a couple months back, by a Wisconsin company called Minion Games.
Congrats to your friend. I’m confused a bit, though, looking at Minion’s site: It says these are “New Print and Play Releases.” Yet the prices are in line with an actual physical game ($45 or so). Are they truly charging that much for games you smply print out yourself?
Minion sells print-and-play versions for around $10, but the stuff they charge $40+ for are boxed retail copies.
