Hello and welcome to Casual Chat!

Today I wanted to discuss something that is familiar in the game space in general and that is the idea of crowdfunding a project.

Now crowdfunding should be a concept that most people are familiar, but if you are not, crowdfunding is the process in which a company asks people to put money down for the promise of some reward later down the line.

The smaller rewards tend to be some small rewards of stickers or pins or a thank you from the creators, but the more money you pledge to a project can sometimes even include your own character or card or some substantial part of the end product.

I wanted to talk about the pros and cons of crowdfunding, primarily for games and gaming accessories, as well as ways that I’ve seen that help make a successful crowdfunding campaign.

Upside of Crowdfunding

This is the major appeal of crowdfunding, but it can help smaller creators actually fund their projects while maintaining full control of the project.

Oftentimes a small company pitches their product to a larger company for a share of the company, or even control of the company just so the smaller company has the resources in order to get their product out to the wider world without worrying too much about finances.

This can be a double edged sword because a company may be able to get the funding that they need or want, they lose control of certain aspects of the game due to having to conform to the larger company’s demands. They may censor certain aspects, fire members of the smaller company, or even stop selling the product after a short period of time while maintaining a good chunk of the profits.

With crowdfunding, the money directly goes to the smaller company that will hopefully be enough to get the product out into the wider world (foreshadowing). This helps the company maintain rights of their product and can help give them a better footing for future negotiations.

Another reason why a company can crowdfund is essentially to help advertise a product to get the eyes on the company for the future. A company can put a smaller, yet useful product for crowdfunding, fulfill their obligations and later on do a slightly bigger campaign and repeat the process until they get to a massive project.

This builds goodwill with their intended customer base so that they are more willing to help crowdfund bigger and bigger projects. If all goes well, then a company can get a solid name in the crowdfunding space that they can get their project funded in a short period of time while making extra money to (hopefully) improve the project.

One of the biggest benefits is also regarding if a crowdfunding campaign doesn’t reach its goal, and that is no money is lost from the potential backer. Most crowdfunding sites only give the money to the company if the goal is hit within the deadline, meaning that people who may be struggling financially can cancel their pledge and not have to worry about waiting to get their money back.

This is also good for the company because it allows them to retool their project to get it into a much more appealing state if they decide to relaunch in the future.

Downside of Crowdfunding

This is one of the harsher realizations of crowdfunding, and that is acknowledging that it is not without its flaws.

The biggest flaw is that if the project gets funded to completion and the company doesn’t go through with shipping their rewards to backers. Maybe they were too ambitious in their rewards and didn’t calculate their finances correctly, maybe something came up to cause a significant delay, or the worst outcome is that the rewards never coming in the first place.

Once a project is funded, it is at the whim of the creators to make sure that the rewards are given out in a timely fashion, and if the longer they are delayed, the more good will is lost by the backers. Most people can understand a delay or two due to some outside factors, but too many delays can cause unrest, especially if the answers given for the delay become less believeable.

Another downside of crowdfunding is if the end rewards are not what people were expecting. This was recently seen in the tabletop gaming space with Wyrmwood Gaming and their current dice fiasco.

Put simply, Wyrmwood Gaming had a campaign where they made nice dice and the dice that people have been getting have not been the best to say the least. People have complained to the company and have not been getting the best responses, with the company downplaying, or potentially ignoring, the issues that the dice have been having and not offering cash refunds, only store credit.

Now this wouldn’t be an issue if most of Wyrmwood’s products weren’t incredibly expensive, so much so that the store credit wouldn’t do much to help the issue. Wyrmwood used to have a stellar reputation, with several companies and influencers sponsoring them after several successful crowdfunding campaigns, but after a series of scandals, a lot of the good will that they had earned has been lost.

The last major issue with crowdfunding is the biggest, and that is some crowdfunding campaigns are outright scams. They were never intending to fulfill their obligations, or they ran out of money and string people along with promises that the product is coming, never really intending for the product to come out.

This is the worst issue because it is essentially theft and while crowdfunding websites do what they can to prevent what they can, sometimes companies can take a good chunk of the money without giving people refunds, and backers lose out on their hard earned money.

Crowdfunding Best Practices

So what makes a successful crowdfunding campaign? A whole host of factors, some easy to understand and others just random happenstance, but I think that there are three major factors to consider when making a successful crowdfunding campaign.

The first is being realistic with your goals. While anyone would want a million dollars to complete their project, people won’t give that much money for a TTRPG supplement. If a goal is too large then people will not be incentivized to donate because they won’t believe the project will get fulfilled, thus they won’t get their rewards.

This leads to the second piece of advice, and that is also be realistic with the rewards. If you you have twenty backer levels, all of which give unique rewards and you succeed in your campaign, you will have to produce all of those rewards.

Some may be easier to do, but if you are too ambitious in the rewards, you’ll be focusing on the rewards rather than the actual project. In fact there have been projects that lose money because they didn’t take making the rewards into account, which causes the doom spiral of a failed project.

The last piece of advice is to be open an upfront with your backers about the project. Sometimes things get messed up, sometimes something happens beyond a company’s control, and sometimes a manufacturer screws over the company.

When these things happen, let the backers know because while they may disappointed that it happened, they are more likely to stick with you because of how transparent you are. Don’t go burning bridges and bad mouthing people or companies, just mention that there are issues and explain in broad enough language what is happening to let the backers know what’s going on. Don’t lie, but don’t say “everything is fine, just a slight delay,” when there is something major going on.

In Conclusion

Now these are general pieces of advice from someone who has never run a crowdfunding campaign in his life, but has been fortunate enough to back campaigns that have only been successful.

For backers, be mindful of what a company is offering. Read every bit of the campaign and maybe do a bit of research on the creators of the campaign to see what you could expect.

For creators, be mindful of what you are offering. You may want to have a bunch of rewards to entice backers, but remember that it takes one mediocre experience to turn someone from a potential life time customer to someone who ignores your company for any subsequent campaign.

Thank you for reading, see you next time!

Peace,

From, J.M. Casual

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