Every day we all see announcements of new Kickstarters, or publishers/designers saying that they've submitted Kickstarters, or that they are planning one. It is a goldrush as publishers, and wannabe publishers, see the dollar signs that some are getting and want a piece of the pie. I had figured originally that in a couple of years we would reach the saturation point and Kickstarter would lose its luster, now I'm not so sure that the tipping point is all that far away.
We have had a couple of high profile RPG Kickstarters fail to materialize after a couple of years: Gary Sarli's e20 has been plagued with alleged behind the scenes issues, nearly from the beginning, and Phil Brucato's Powerchords is apparently in a limbo-like state since achieving funding in 2010. Yes, I know, there will be defenders of both of these Kickstarters that will likely come out of the woodwork, but I still say that a 2-year gap after reaching funding with no product in sight is inexcusable. With the rush for money that is going on with Kickstarter and people wanting to publish, I think that this is really only the tip of the iceberg. When you have people who do not have any sort of business background, working off of the basis of their "awesome" ideas, who are suddenly hit with the fees and taxes that come with having a real business it is going to be easy for them to get overwhelmed and burn out as well. Considering the history of a lack of business training that we have in the RPG business, there could be a lot of these coming up in the future. Like I said in a recent post here, there are too many (both fans and publishers) who value
enthusiasm over professionalism, and this is going to bite Kickstarter backers on the ass.
True, I want creators and designers who are excited about their upcoming and current projects, but enthusiasm without professionalism, or even some sort of track record, doesn't mean that things are going to get done. This also leads to Kickstarter overload, with publishers announcing one Kickstarter after another, sometimes launching a new project before the previous one reaches its final stages of coming to market. Enthusiastic, yes...but is it practical? I don't really think so, plus it starts to lead to a fatigue and the fans start to believe that publishers see them as nothing more than a piggy bank. This attitude is already surfacing around the various social media outlets as gamers are saying "Enough!" to the grind of Kickstarter projects.
The enthusiasm angle also has the added danger of self-selecting for your existing audience. If you know who your audience is, and you know what they want, you end up selling the same things to them over and over again, at the exclusion of a broader market. This ends up creating a look of success to your Kickstarters, but there's no further buzz or market share gained, which is one of the strengths of Kickstarter if you plan on getting your product into distribution.
A year ago I would have said that Kickstarter was the savior of RPGs, allowing projects that would never have seen the light of day to have a chance at getting published. Now, I'm not as certain about that as I used to be. Publishers need to start pacing themselves, particularly in this economy, and realize that every Kickstarter isn't going to be like Traveller5 or Ogre. Yes, there's money to be made to get projects off of the ground, but now we are even seeing projects that announce their stretch goals out of the gate. The assumption being that gamers are going to kiddy up the money. A couple of these projects have had to revise their pre-announced stretch goals, or offer up further bribes to get people interested.
Sloppiness also plagues Kickstarter projects. The reason why I made my Enthusiasm post (linked about) was because I encountered a poorly written Kickstarter project from them, not to mention poorly thought out. A "stealth" Kickstarter like theirs, they are Kickstarting a new printing of their Swords & Wizardry Complete book and yet one of the pledge levels is for a new version of their Monsters book) leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Subsequent communication with whomever answers the mail on their Kickstarter account didn't do much to help that feeling. Ultimately, I chose to not support their Kickstarter, even though I would have liked the books that they were offering. I'm sure that some people will think that there's nothing wrong with adding a stealth Kickstarter to a publisher's existing project but I think that is just another example of the money-grab mentality that is surfacing. I will admit that this mentality isn't unique to those with RPG-related project, it is just that those are the ones that I am watching.
I do not think that Kickstarter is a bad thing. I still think that it will be able to help a lot of publishers get their projects into the hands of gamers that would not have otherwise seen them. I do think that publishers need to exercise more caution and forethought, and a little less enthusiasm on the part of their projects. I'm sure that this isn't going to be a popular or widely-held opinion within gaming circles, but it has been percolating in my head for a while and I think that it finally needed to be released into the wild. Hopefully this spawns some debate and thought on the subject before more gamers get burned on overly enthusiastic projects that never see the light of day.
