How could Kickstarter be better?

I have never used Kickstarter in the past but my publisher is going to use it to launch my game Tahiti soon.

Im sure i'll have some feedback once we have gone through the process.

The biggest problem with Kickstarter is the search platform. I cannot look up "Recently Launched Boardgames." I can look up "recently Launched" but then have to wade through stuff I could not care about to find the new games. If I go to the Board Game page, all I can see if "Staff Picks" "recently Successful" and "Hot this week." I want to see what is brand new, so I can read through those, and get in on the ground floor to help those projects.

That being said, it could be even more specific (Dice games, cards games, RPGs) Then my search would be that much easier.

A Kickstarter alternative has to offer something distinctive that steers projects and supporters to it. Here's the way I would approach it, if I were going to start a company to do this.

With the glut of game projects on Kickstarter, the inability for a consumer to realistically sort through them all, and the possibility of a "backlash" against KS due to KS games underperforming expectations (should that in fact happen), gives a possible angle for a business: a KS alternative that offers only "premier" games. The idea would be that your service would vet the games and ensure that they’re of exceptional quality. Specific suggestions:

1. You would pre-screen the games, aiming for a high rejection rate of at least, say, 75%. This will convince people you aren’t just willing to take the money of any Joe Schmoe who wants to publish a game.

2. Enlist the support of highly respected reviewers, and pay them for their time. For point 1, the fact that you accepted or rejected a game is of limited value, because no one knows who you are. But they know who Tom Vasel is. If you can get high-caliber reviewers to serve as your editorial board, and use their feedback in filtering out which games you accept, you will start with a lot of credibility. And because you’re paying them, (instead of the publishers paying them), you will avoid the “this favorable review was bought” concern that will plague future KS projects.

Basically, the way KS is going is that there are so many projects that to get heard above the noise, a project is going to need reviews from top flight reviewers, and, inundated with review requests, the top reviewers are going to start charging publishers for their time, which creates a conflict of interest situation that is terribly unhealthy for the hobby. A service that provides the reviews to the customers can be a great middleman in this regard.

3. Place the buyer's emphasis on “pre-ordering” games, instead of the “funding a dream” mentality that KS is built around. This will mitigate complaints about projects using KS in ways that “it’s not intended” to be used, and will encourage more veteran publishers to participate.

4. (Possibly) Only accept publishers who have at least one game already in print. This will give buyers confidence that the publisher can deliver on the game and has at least some idea of what they're doing: that it's not just some guy who designed a game and now wants to publish it.

5. Insist that projects be shovel-ready; ie, playtesting is done, artwork is done, rulebook is done, written, trouble-shot, and formatted. Everything is ready for the game to be sent to the printers.

6. (Possibly) Vet the production specs of the game projects, and ensure the quotes that the publisher has received from the printers call for acceptable levels of quality in the components. This might be getting deeper in the weeds than you want to go, but basically you want to be able to tell supporters that they're going to get a good quality game, not flimsy cardstock, an unmounted board, etc.

I think these things, taken together, will provide your customers with a high level of confidence that the projects at your site are high quality, and are likely to be produced in a quality way and in a realistic time table.

How could you also make your service attractive to publishers? The biggest thing would be to solve the international shipping issue. There are many buyers in Europe and elsewhere who would love to support KS campaigns, but the exorbitant cost of shipping prohibits them from participating. By finding an international distribution partner, or in some way figuring out a logistical solution for the games to be able to ship worldwide for no additional cost compared to domestic US shipping, you will unlock a lot of doors for publishers without their having to do the legwork.

One way to achieve this might be to have several projects running concurrently, and when these all fund and print, perhaps you find a way to send a container to Europe that’s filled with several of the titles.

Related to this, having several campaigns running concurrently, and with the higher level of central organization that the above model could permit, you could perhaps have cross-project promotions that let a buyer pledge to multiple campaigns for some discount or upgrade or whatever. Perhaps instead of the rigid rewards structure that is characteristic of KS, there could be more fluidity and flexibility to the rewards you can choose when you support a campaign, and perhaps having more coordination across campaigns is a way to navigate the economies of scale issues to make this happen.

Here are my replies. I hope these don't come across as excessively negative; trying to provide constructive criticism, hope it comes through that way. As a prospective publisher who will probably run a KS-like campaign, I'm all for alternative options.

Playing devil's advocate, a heavy advertising push at a website no one goes to and from a company that no one has heard of don't exactly sound like a straight line to a successful campaign. So this promise as only good as Avalaunch's overall level of visibility and cache in the hobby. That's part of why I think billing yourself as KS with something fundamentally different would be helpful if not essential. Otherwise, you'll just be perceived as the website that's trying to cash in on KS's business model.

My sense at this point is that many KS supporters are board game geeks, who probably hear about the projects largely through BGG. So getting through to those buyers would follow the established mechanisms, and it's not clear you'd be able to help much -- ie that you know how to turn over stones that others have left unturned. If you know some way to reach non game geeks that might be appealing.

I don't believe KS game projects are really hurting from KS personnel not being gamers.

This is exactly how KS works already, or at least how most KS campaigns are run. The latest craze in KS is "stretch goals", which I think are kind of annoying, because they basically tell the buyer that he is expected to participate in the game's marketing if he wants to get the cool promo items. That's great for a publisher, but it's a lot to ask of a buyer. Whereas, exclusive content or something of intrinsic value, encourage you to support because your purchase will have intrinsic value, whether you round up 20 friends to support the game or not.

Tom probably costs much more than $100 per game.

But you wouldn't send every game to Tom. Tom, or other comparably respected reviewers, would have to approve every game that you post, but they wouldn't have to personally reject every project that you reject. Probably half of the games you'll get will be obviously not good enough, and you can reject those on your own, no reviews needed.

But yes, getting good reviewers would be expensive. That would be part of the service you'd be providing to the buyer.

This is basically already a part of KS campaigns, albeit informally. It is structurally flawed, in my view, because of the conflict of interest between the reviewer taking money from the publisher and being expected to deliver an unbiased review. Whereas, if your site pays for the review, and only the well-reviewed games go through, this conflict is removed.

Again, this is already how KS works, or at least, how many campaigns are run. You're asking consumers to do more work rather than less. That doesn't sound like a very appealing KS alternative, as a consumer.

Right, this would be an advantage of a centrally organized site as opposed to the hodge podge of projects at KS.

I don't think it adds anything so obviously superior to KS that I'd want to go with your site instead of KS if/when I planned to start a campaign. Unless your cut was less, or you offered something different, I'm not sure it would be better to use your service than to use KS. On the other hand, if you were going to handle most of the advertising (and pay for it), that would at least take one consideration off the table that I'd have to worry about. Although, it might not be wise of me to leave something as important as advertising and promotion to someone else, either.

Agreed, economies of scale help a bit but a game that sells through a print run of 2,000 copies barely breaks even and you have to get to print runs of 5,000 to 10,000 before you have something that looks like a "hit", and those are so hard to come by that you can't ask publishers to bottom out their upside when they have the good fortune to happen upon one.

If you are going to game conventions and advertising there, you might be able to pull in buyers that are gamers but aren't BoardGameGeeks and don't have a high level of KS visibility. Other than that, I think there is already a perfectly effective version of KS for board game projects, and it's called "Kickstarter."

If you have a thousand submissions a month and you're accepting 25% of them as projects, then your level of funding will be increasing as well, so you simply scale up your editorial staff to accommodate the influx. You're kind of exaggerating here, by the way; you're not ever going to get 1000 submissions a month, the industry just isn't that big. Also note that you also don't have to play every game. You might look at how contests like Hippodice are run for inspiration. There's a prescreen where they read the rules and only pass probably 25% of the games through to playtesting, then test those and downselect to about 10 games, then a panel of industry judges selects a winner from among those. You could probably emulate something like that here.

Hey, it's your company, it doesn't matter to me. But you seem to be naysaying this idea without actually giving it any serious thought about how to make it work. And I think you desperately need an idea like this (not necessarily this exact idea, but something like it) to add value to your site for the customer, that makes them want to come to your site and back projects. You're focused too much, in my view, on how to add value for publishers. It's the buyers you ultimately need to attract, and "we will advertise like crazy" isn't a serious business model. And to convince publishers (like me) that it's worth going with you instead of a high-visibility, established site like KS, you have to convince us that you have something to offer buyers that will bring them in in droves. A fun interface, stretch goals, and PnP playtest opportunities aren't unique, original, or compelling.

I think several companies release PnP versions of the games while the campaign is running so prospective buyers can take a test drive. This is pretty important, actually. For traditionally published games, most geeks don't impulse-buy, they want to play the games a few times at their local store or play their friend's copy or whatever. With a KS game, you're asking them to buy sight-unseen, and that's a lot to ask, so releasing a PnP is an important in-between.

Not until you've demonstrated quite a few successes that show that you understand the game production process extremely well and can consistently produce a very high quality product. As a prospective publisher, this idea has zero appeal to me. But as a designer, for a game that I just wanted to get out there, but didn't want to build a business around, it could be of some interest if I wanted to save myself the legwork. Of course there would have to be language in the terms whereby the designer retains all rights to the design and artwork and you're simply providing a service for which your fee is $X or Y% of the total take. There are a lot of self-publishers on KS so this could appeal to them.

http://gambitious.com/

If you can swing going to E3 might be worth checking out their launch.

My project is an online prototyping/playtesting system: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/468008685/global-gamespace - I think you took a look through one of my blog posts on BGG.

Another thing that you could potentially provide with Avalaunch could be help with promotions. The big name sites, blogs, and podcasts get absolutely flooded with requests to look at people's small projects and I expect that a lot of good things get lost in the noise. If avalaunch could act as a sort of aggregator/first round review, and connect good ideas from unknown people with large outlets, that could be a HUGE advantage over Kickstarter (who really only pushes you to the front page if you have "momentum").

Curtis,

While the new jobs legislation does a great job of normalizing the requirements for exemption in your investor pool, there is already existing state legislation to achieve this goal. Its a bit more of a reporting burden than what the Jobs Act provision provides for, but you could file individually in states for a blanket exemption and use a standardized form to get 80% of them filed (California is pretty specific on what you have to do and they don't accept other states forms).

I know a few companies taking this approach to build up some momentum and buzz before the floodgates are officially opened. I don't know that Gambitious is taking this approach, but you can with the right state fillings crowdfund your company on a sale of equity if you're willing to file all the paperwork properly. Given, it will probably cost you 10k in legal/accounting fees + a ton of time so its not really an option for the average knitting project.

I could be wrong here, but for me the main flaw with Kickstarter is its debilitating payment affiliations. I think you would have more chance of establishing a going concern by servicing a glaring flaw than competing directly with an established market leader.

If you look at the alternatives to Kickstarter theyre not making any major headway in terms of market share regardless of their provisional differences.

It might have changed (I havent checked recently) but my past information suggests that a major hurdle for Europeans is that they cant make any use of the site without an American based bank account.

If you were to act as an underwriter for Kickstarter campaigns for Europeans this would be a very attractive option. Naturally you would want to verify anyone looking to offer a game through Kickstarter via Avalaunch. This would make vetting the products an important part of the business model.

Interested parties would submit the game to you and you would playtest it, make any recommendations for improvements to quality, promote it and then host it as an underwriter. After all you dont want to sign your name as the supporter of a cold turkey or rotten egg.

You could improve the service by handling stateside distribution and possibly production. A game is submitted and working with established order fulfilment services and manufacturers the games could be sent straight to the US backers from a local source.

Conversely you could send bulk deliveries to the agents in the various countries reducing shipping costs for European backers of American projects. The agents would receive the deliveries and then post them locally to the required points in the various countries. This will make backing American projects more attractive to Europeans increasing their chance of reaching their funding goals.

This could save US backers the excessive shipping costs when backing the few European projects that make it onto the site - making such projects more attractive to American backers.

The game designers would have someone stateside to handle distribution, customs and so on - making their life much easier. They could also - if required - have you make and distribute the games, either personally or through links to secondary partners.

It would be a service that offered benefits to everyone concerned. Open up Kickstarter to Europeans, bring business to US based manufacturers and distributers, reduce excessive shipping costs for American backers, and give you a slice of a huge market that is relatively untapped.

It would be one of those rare middle men services I myself would take advantage of. More to the point, if i was stateside I would already be doing it and I cant understand why nobody else is.

It would establish Avalaunch as a one stop shop for facilitating the needs of game designers - promotion, potential product funding, production and distribution all wrapped up in a single trustworthy location. If you took a small percentage from each part of the process that could ensure a nice overall return.

You could even enlist agents in the various European countries. That would give potential customers a local point for service - eliminating any language barriers.

It would also allow you to split game testing amongst these agents - benefiting you by dispersing the testing workload and benefiting clients because they wouldnt have to ship their games back and forth half way round the world for testing. Local agents could also talk to prospective clients face to face and handle any problems or provide general advice. This would allow you to offer them a more personal service.

Dunno, sounds like a gap in the market that could be exploited to the benefit of everyone concerned. Its a fairly simple business model to put in place and in anticipation of any UK agent requirement I would be available :)

Imo Kickstarter has two massive flaws right now:
1) It's open only for US residents which, understandably, leaves a bit of a sour aftertaste.
2) In order for your project to appear it needs to be approved by kickstarter team. So if some geek in New York deems your project not "cool" "edgy" or "hip" enough you don't get a chance to appeal to the public.
So, while pretending to be public, open and transparent, KS is actually everything but and most people browsing and spendin money on KS are not aware that only the americans are allowed to apply and then only the ones approved by an unelected coterie of hip dudes.
Sadly "kickstarter" is the only fundraising site the general public knows and "kickstarting" has become buzzword so other fundraising sites such as indiegogo (actually older than KS) and their projects don't have much of a chance.

I have a different viewpoint which you might find interesting. When I approach a publisher to sell one of my games, my pitch goes pretty much like this-

If you believe in my product to the point where you are willing to go through all the hoops of producing / publishing it that you want to negotiate buying it from me, realize I might have a difficult time letting go of my creation to someone who isn't willing to go 'the last mile'.

I completely understand that the publisher is putting himself at risk by putting the money out there to get my game on the shelf, while I am just sitting back with nothing [!] but my reputation on the line. While the scale of risk isn't even comparable [and I'm not trying to pretend it is], it is nevertheless recoverable for the publisher. One bad game isn’t going to break a company. But one stinker on the market with my name on it could well be the end of my career. The risks aren’t the same, but they are there for both of us.

All I'm saying is - if you believe in the product then make he same commit to it that I have. My terms are not unreasonable - I purposely drop 25% of what you figure to pay me [through royalties] over the course of the next year [or five years] to make it worth your while. If you can't commit to that, it is a subtle hint to me that [at some level] you are not CONVINCED my creation WILL sell at that level, but that it MIGHT.

Which - ultimately - tells me that selling my games one at a time is probably right where it belongs, and not in a store under your imprimatur. Which is where I am now as I sell them individually on my own. Not that it wouldn't be beyond cool. ;-)

To be clear. You may estimate that you will sell 3,000 units over 2 years. You offer me $500 up front signing bonus and 10% royalty on sales every 6 months.
In the end, that’s $3,500 to me. I would prefer a check for $2,600 up front. That’s a 25% savings for you – and might even allow you to knock $1.00 off the cost if you don’t want to pocket the extra money. In 2 years [or sooner if the print run goes well], we can renegotiate for another print run.

My game gets on the shelf, I get paid, you save money – what’s not to like? You can bet when you come back to negotiate another print run, I’m not going to gouge you. Why? Because I’ve got OTHER games I want you to buy!

My name and my integrity are all I have. Without them, I’m no different from any of the other 1,000 guys out there.

DIFFERENT TOPIC ALERT

As to ‘vetting’ different games – take advantage of the Convention circuit that exists out there already. There are a hundred Cons every year, use them. Encourage the Cons to have design competitions and award BEST OF certificates. The Cons have another event, the players feel they have a chance to reward good designs, and designers have a venue to get known. A good example is the KS darling D-DAY DICE which showed up with 3 BEST OF awards from different Cons and it met its KS goals in a huge way.

Restrict anyone sending you a prototype to those who have won a BEST OF award – it would be a legitimate screening process.