I hear what you're saying, Consty.
But for me, it comes down to a couple things. First, the Traveller IP is
Marc's and he has every right to handle it the way he wants. Traveller
fans have for a long time tended to think of it as a public trust, but
it's private IP, and someone owns it and gets to decide what to do with
it. And the other is that this kickstarter direct capitalization is a
reality, so people are going to use it, and good for them for using the
tools that are out there. Like I said to Evyn, had it been around in 1995,
GDW should have sure tried to use it to say, "Hey, if we can make sure
Dave doesn't get evicted, we can finish RSG and Armor 21, and oh, by the
way, those of you who never saw RSB and RCVG in your local gameshoppe,
they are in stock and available for direct order as paper or PDF
download."
The thing that makes my brain churn are things like--and I am not talking
about Marc here, just wondering in general, "what is the mechanism to
ensure that the commitments kickstarter paid for get carried out, and who
pays you back if it doesn't happen?" It's definitely a very different
wrinkle from the way things were done before. In traditional
capitalization investors get shares in the venture, so have an expectation
of control how their money is spent. In crowdsourced capitalization you
get swag. I got the impression from Marc's "Dear Communists" messages (I
just find that humorous, raising money for a capitalist venture from
communists, and Marc is a smart guy, he knows what "Fellow Travellers" has
meant historically, so he has to have his tongue in his cheek each time he
types that) that he is saying there will be more follow-on in 2013,
although the only thing kickstart investors are guaranteed to get is the
swag. As someone who has had to write a business plan, that is quite a
switch. If you're raising start-up capital, how far does it take you? When
do profits kick in to fund the follow-on releases? And kickstarter appears
to be more vague in that area, but I'm no expert.
And someday I'll be dead. That's the only guarantee I've ever gotten, and
some days, grateful for it.
Dave
> --- In
, dcndcn13@... wrote:
>>
>> Whatever you want to call them, the point is there is a reason that
>> T5 broke all of the kickstart records. If you look at the list in a
>> recent Fellow Travellers message, it shows the list of previous
>> record-holders.
>
> But why does that matter? Kickstarter isn't some giant cock-waving
> exercise, it's a means to raise money for a project. T5 was completely
> funded within a few days - the other $200,000+ was raised just by people
> throwing more money than was actually necessary at it (and I really don't
> think that a few colour plates and deckplans is really worthy of $200,000
> - they could do the whole damn book in full colour with professional-level
> artwork and deckplans and still have money leftover).
>
>> So the moral is, if you want to be successful kickstarting something,
>> don't kickstart something brand-new, "kick re-start" something that's
>> already been around for a long time.
>
> I'm not sure that's the moral I take from this, or the moral that we
> should take from it. The moral I get from it is "if you can rely entirely
> on 'goodwill and nostalgia' then you don't need to make any actual effort
> to *sell* your product because you'll have people throwing money at you in
> their droves regardless of its quality". Because that's what's happened
> here.
>
> Personally I suspect that when people finally get what they spent a lot of
> cash for months down the line, they'll realise in the cold light of day
> that it actually wasn't worth the money. For crying out loud, there's a
> significant number of people have spent over *$500* on this thing. It's
> mindboggling to me.