Kickstarter and other crowdfunding

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Mongrel
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jan 10, 2017 1:22 am

How appropriate that I just finished listening to Trouble Every Day a few minutes ago.
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Thad
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Tue Jan 10, 2017 1:44 am

So I'm watchin' and I'm waitin'
Hopin' for the best
Even think I'll go to prayin'
Every time I hear 'em sayin'
That there's no way to delay
That trouble comin' every day
No way to delay
That trouble comin' every day

Yeah, that seems about right, even before getting to the verse about race riots.

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Thad
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Sat Mar 11, 2017 1:06 pm

Another Ditko Kickstarter is up, featuring 2 new books.

I got the $55 tier last time and I think I will again on this one; it's a great value (both new books plus $50 worth of other books of your choosing; there's a list of books in print over at the Ditko Blog).

I'm still working my way through the last bunch of books I got. Avenging World is the most Ditko thing I have ever read. It's got a little bit of everything, from offbeat superheroes like D. Skys (an actor who uses a different costume every time he appears) to lengthy and digressive essays about how "creators' rights" is a flawed concept if you don't define it as a subcategory of property rights.

Meanwhile, since it's the last thing we were talking about in the thread, I'll add that Dweezil Zappa's campaign on Pledge Music has passed 100%.

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Silversong
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Silversong » Wed Mar 15, 2017 8:46 am

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/51 ... d-by-armor

Damn, the question is do I get one of them, or all of them. Too bad they aren't actually armored enough to wear for fencing.

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Büge
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Büge » Wed Mar 15, 2017 10:04 am

Those look amazing and I want them all.
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Silversong
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Silversong » Wed Mar 15, 2017 2:05 pm

They're very close to making the men's leggings stretch goal, I think they'll probably hit it at this point.

I backed for the Scudamore leggings. I'm excited that these are meant to ship before Gen Con.

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Büge
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Büge » Wed Mar 15, 2017 4:31 pm

Silversong wrote:They're very close to making the men's leggings stretch goal, I think they'll probably hit it at this point.


:I

I'm not looking for men's leggings.
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Silversong
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Silversong » Thu Mar 16, 2017 11:09 am

Sorry, I wasn't really paying attention. I just want everyone to wear armor clothes. Knight-punk can be the new steampunk.

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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Fri Jul 24, 2020 4:45 pm

Suikoden’s creators are crowdfunding a spiritual successor

Cautiously optimistic. Sometimes you get Bloodstained, sometimes you get Mighty No. 9, and a lot of the time you get nothing at all.

I mentioned this before, but I heard on Retronauts that Suikoden 1 was conceived as something of a dry run for Suikoden 2 -- 2 was the game they really wanted to make, but it was massively ambitious so they decided to make a smaller game first to see if they could pull it off. If we're talking about the same folks here, let's hope they've remembered that lesson and can set achievable goals for their first project.

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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Mon Jul 27, 2020 6:35 pm

The Eiyuden Chronicle Kickstarter opened today and it's already hit its goal.

There are still stretch goals. If they hit $1.25M, they're adding a cooking minigame. These guys know their audience.

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MarsDragon
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby MarsDragon » Mon Jul 27, 2020 8:30 pm

Backed for about as much as my first pick for Bloodstained.

I feel reasonably confident in them - if you actually read the entire thing, they have a long list of mistakes they've seen other KSes do and how to avoid them, so at least they're trying to learn from others. And they have the folks that really worked on a lot of the games people liked on board in good positions, and all of them spent time in the depths of Konami, which teaches everyone but Kojima how to economize. Plus they're basically just remaking Suikoden II, which...sure, I believe they can do a decent job of SII. They look like they're trying to work within their limitations (and props for explaining upfront that good pixel art is as or more expensive than 3D), they have a publisher handing out the real cash, I think we're at least going to get a game out of this. How many times it's delayed...that's the part I'm not willing to bet on.

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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Mon Jul 27, 2020 9:21 pm

MarsDragon wrote:I feel reasonably confident in them - if you actually read the entire thing, they have a long list of mistakes they've seen other KSes do and how to avoid them, so at least they're trying to learn from others.

Yeah, the part about "Look, it's probably going to be too expensive to port to Switch; hopefully we'll be able to release on Nintendo's next console but if we can't we'll give you your money back" seemed particularly well-thought-out. (Bloodstained promised Mac and Linux versions and then didn't even offer refunds when they were canceled, which is a blemish on a campaign that otherwise is one of the great crowdfunded game success stories.) Rule #1 in crowdfunding campaigns is to set achievable goals, and they seem to have put a lot of thought into that.

...Looks like it's passed $1M, which means there'll be a PS4 version. Wonder if it'll play lefthanded like Suikoden.

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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Fri Aug 07, 2020 7:09 pm

Started wondering "Is Smash playable with a fight stick?", looked into it, and discovered the Kickstarter for the Smash Stick, an analog fighting stick specifically designed for Smash Bros.

I'm not the kinda guy who spends $250 on a controller, so it's not for me. (Guess I'll just have to experiment with my standard 8-direction fight stick.) But I respect the engineering.

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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Sun Sep 27, 2020 5:02 pm

Artist Tom Richmond and writer Desmond Devlin, longtime contributors to Mad, are crowdfunding Claptrap, a book of original movie parodies in the Mad tradition, on IndieGoGo.

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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Thu Feb 04, 2021 11:55 am

Nathan Rabin's Kickstarting a new book, The Joy of Trash, that will collect a number of essays from his website as well as some new stuff.

I've been a fan of Rabin's analysis of trash culture since My Year of Flops first began all the way back in 2007. He's got that kind of MST3K sense of how things that are terrible are also kind of wonderful. (Hell, some of the movies Rifftrax has riffed are movies that Rabin helped to give cult status to, like A Talking Cat!?!)

I find his essays on the intersection of politics and pop culture to be especially incisive and biting; he mentions that the book will include his reviews of Loqueesha and Milo Yiannopoulos' Dangerous, and those are a couple of my favorite things he's written over the past few years.

Various reward tiers include some of his other books, including the ones on Weird Al and Postal.

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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Newbie » Thu Feb 04, 2021 2:04 pm

A friend from another forum is currently getting backing for Dungeon Bitches (a queer TTRPG with teeth) which is running through Valentine's Day. They have exceeded their original funding goals by a respectable margin. (If the name didn't give you enough warning, this game will include gore, nudity, and sexuality, so consider not accessing this project on a work computer.)
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Thad
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Thu Mar 04, 2021 12:24 pm

Gamemaster Classified

The ultimate Nintendo fan (Matthew Taranto) teams up with Nintendo’s own Gamemaster (Howard Phillips) to make a tell-all book!

Howard got his start at Nintendo unloading thousands of Donkey Kong arcade machines into a warehouse, but within a decade became Director, Game Creative and "Gamemaster" - a sort of corporate mascot for the company. You might recognize him from Nintendo Power's Howard & Nester comics! Well, the Gamemaster is back to dole out info in a tell-all book about his mostly fun-filled 10 years at Nintendo of America (NOA)! From behind-the-scenes secrets to his own personal reviews of over 100 games, Howard's ready to prove what we always knew--that knowledge is (Nintendo) power!

Joining Howard is Matthew, a webcomic artist, composer and Nintendo Switch indie game designer. But first and foremost, Matthew is a gamer and will be offering the perspective of a kid who grew up in the NES era. So while Howard discusses playtesting every NES title under the sun, Matthew will offer his perspective of an American boy whose childhood was enriched by these fun experiences. Also, he'll be handling art: the layouts, the book's frequent comic breaks, plus hundreds of unique illustrations!


Looks to be laid out like an oversized issue of Nintendo Power. The book's already hit its funding goal, but it's got 6 days left and if you want to kick in it's $19 for a PDF and $39 plus shipping for a hardcover. There are still some stretch goals, too; at $80,000 they'll add a section on merchandise, and at $100,000 they'll add a section on Japanese games Nintendo decided not to localize.

Taranto's got several successful Kickstarter projects under his belt, most of which are books, so I think this is one of those Kickstarter projects that you can be reasonably confident will ultimately result in a thing that exists.

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Thad
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Fri Mar 12, 2021 12:24 am

Thad wrote:at $100,000 they'll add a section on Japanese games Nintendo decided not to localize.

The campaign's over and they didn't quite hit that goal, but they've suggested it's still on the table if they get enough preorders.

I...don't think the ebook edition is supposed to say $0.

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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Tue Apr 06, 2021 2:31 pm

42: the wildly improbable ideas of Douglas Adams

After his death in 2001, Douglas Adams's papers were loaned to his old Cambridge college, St John's – over 60 boxes full of notebooks, research, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches, to-do lists, hard drives and even poems.

The book will reproduce in facsimile form extracts from the archive with explanatory text and footnotes to add context. Developed in close association with Adams’s family and literary estate, 42 will be a full-colour, large-format hardback that follows his career from early collaborations with Graham Chapman to his work on Doctor Who, through the Hitchhiker years, Dirk Gently, his groundbreaking non-fiction book Last Chance to See and his later digital work. Alongside this are details of projects that never came to fruition like a proposed theme park ride and a TV series provisionally entitled The Secret Empire.


£15 for an ebook, £30 for a hardcover, shipping to the US is £18. Current exchange rate £1 = USD $1.38, so if you're in the US, that's $21 for an ebook and $67 including shipping for a hardcover.

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Thad
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Re: Kickstarter

Postby Thad » Wed Apr 07, 2021 3:20 pm

Let's Make More MST3K & Build THE GIZMOPLEX!

The idea this time is they're not going to shop it to networks, they're going to set up their own video site.

$35 gets you a 3-month subscription and lets you stream the first 3 episodes when they premier. $100 gets you a digital download of "every new episode we make" (I assume meaning the 3-12 they're planning to make as part of this Kickstarter, not every new episode in perpetuity).

They're being a lot stingier on the classic episode rewards this time than last time; you get 10 old episodes to download at the $250 tier. Maybe they'll do what they did last time and introduce a digital-only tier later on in the campaign.

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