Support your FLGS
It’s that time again. Saturday, June 15th is Free RPG Day. Many game stores of the friendly local variety will be hosting events—and incidentally, giving away free RPGs. Why not take the opportunity to do a little shopping?
Monday Miniatures: Wild Ride
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What a week, and I don’t just mean Kickstarter!
First the story of the weekend: Deadzone became the 6th Mini-centric project on our favorite crowdfunding website to cross the million dollar mark when Mantic raised more than $1.2 million for it’s skirmish game. Note the extremely parabolic funding curve; more than 1/3 of that money was raised in the final day.
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Originally I didn’t think much of this project. Mantic is churning out games in an assembly line fashion lately, and as regular readers know, I don’t see that as Kickstarters purpose. They also seem to be making clones of ole GW’s properties one at a time, and that annoys me too – Blizard already did that once. But I loved Necromunda, (and wish that Games Workshop was still actively supporting it,) so I lurked.
I liked what I saw, and long story short they now have a decent chunk of change from my products. I’ll let you know how that turns out later this year.
All Grown Up
Heraclitus said that “the only thing in that is constant is change.” The line is as true of the internet as it is the natural world in which he was making his observations. Sure, granite might take a little longer to wear down, and the seasons are far more predictable than trying to divine which players will be on top of the heap next quarter, but it is all change to one degree or another. Once upon a time, afterall, AOL and Yahoo were immortal titans of industry. Today it is Kickstarters turn.
What changes have been taking place with our favorite crowdfunding website? Well, I’ll give you a hint – they haven’t yet found the time to improve their native search functionality.
A Big Win for Palladium?
Funding closed last week on Palladium Books’ Robotech RPG Tactics, a miniature game based on the classic Harmony Gold anime and Palladium RPG of the same name (sans “Tactics,” at any rate). All told, it was a pretty successful project, raking in over $1.4 million in it’s one month run. By all accounts, the campaign is a coup for the Michigan-based company that has historically struggled with its finances. So what does this portend for Palladium?
Monday Miniatures: Dead-Tired
Until this weekend I had forgotten what sleeping in felt like. Seriously, it has been far too long. You can keep the rest of the extra day, me – all I needed were the first couple hours.
Alright, I MIGHT have found something productive to do with the rest of that time, but for once it was nice not to have to running screaming with my hair on fire for some reason related to work/moving/real estate transactions. Side note: on Tuesday I expect to be running around screaming with my hair on fire for reasons wholly related to work.
But that’s 24 hours from now – that’s practically an eternity. Why worry about tomorrow when we can ogle miniature projects today!
Project Delays
Well, we’re late.
The original plan called for a digital delivery in late April, and a physical delivery in late May. Right about now we were supposed to be getting in a crate of comic books to share with all of you; obviously that hasn’t happened.
Jack Kirby
We’ve seen a lot of Kickstarter projects in the last couple years for some of the geeky greats. Larry Elmore was just the most recent (and successful) in a string of classic artists and game designers who are now getting another well deserved 15 minutes of fame.
I think it’s great. In many ways crowdfunding is a way for a creator to cash in on their popularity; i’d much prefer their fans give them money directly rather than see them get 10% of the take because their manager/distributor/promoter/etc all got their cut.
What happens though, when even this laudable trend goes wrong?
Monday Miniatures: Reruns
This week there isn’t much new under the sun. Well – there is a lot of new stuff; my life continues to be one wild ride of work obligations and moving preparations.
There just isn’t much new related to miniatures in crowd funding this week. Don’t believe me? You’re welcome to look yourself, but I’m pretty sure I found all the news that is fit to print, and you have seen most of them before.
That’s right, the majority of the projects launched this week were relaunches of efforts that didn’t go so well previously.
I’m a Backer: Exalted 3rd Edition
This is a bit of a departure from our traditional “Im a Backer” format, but I wanted to talk a project that has me all a flutter. A while back I mentioned that a number of new editions of great role playing games were going to roll out this year. My most hotly anticipated of those titles was third edition of White Wolf’/Onyx Path Publishing’s amazing “Exalted” game line. Well, late last week the Kickstarter project to fund a deluxe hardcover edition went live, and it’s tearing it up.
Look below the fold to learn more.
Miniature Mondays: Flooded Edition
This week was a busy one for me. On a note utterly unrelated to Kickstarter or miniatures, I put an offer in on a house this weekend. Hopefully this means that in the near future life will settle down so I can devote some time to painting, and more time to blogging and such; in the interim though, as I prepare to move and all that, I imagine it will get worse before it gets better. We’ll see.
The current events of my life are the only overwhelming thing we have to cover today. This week we have 6 new projects to look at on Kickstarter and a variety of painting pictures to peruse.
Caffeineforge 