Literally same here, but I hope no Infinity profiles appear for Tag Raid. I'm fed up with unnecessary profiles from A and Def being thrown into Infinity Army just to confuse new and old players alike. There's so much design space to create new profiles in brand new armies. Seriously, let Tag Raid be a board game if CB is all about board game market right now. I'd rather see CB doing KS campaigns for FULL new armies with all the fucking miniatures at release, plus additional profile miniatures as stretch goals. At least there would be a chance to play these armies before they get burrowed under all the new new new newer releases.
Eh, that'd kill retailers. Probably not a good thing in the long run. There'll be some going up on the AU second hand groups when I get them.
I disagree. You KS entire range for crazies who'll get it, then release the stuff in small waves to retailers and anyone who either doesn't had enough dough to enter KS race, or who just does not want to get entire range - can purchase via retailers. At this point KS backers funded entire production, including copies that'd go to retailers. But I get it's wishful thinking on my part.
New factions for N4 are going to sell anyway, they're the lowest risk products from CB's point of view. There's no real reason to use a Kickstarter. Cutting retailers and distributors out of initial sales and preorders is also a really bad idea if you want them to continue ordering and stocking your product. Crowdfunding is for companies that want to go "Hey, we have a cool idea for a game, but aren't sure if there's a market for it, this is what we have so far" the crowdfunding campaign gives the company a concrete number for production, funds what's left of the development and production, and allows them to pitch at a lower price due to the fact it's being sold direct to the customer. They're often products that wouldn't have seen retail anyway as they'd not have existed without the crowdfunding, so there's less of an impact on your normal distributor/retailer orders.
CB charges distributor prices on their kickstarters to increase volume, they expect retailers to put their own markups on them. Even if they didn't use this model the idea doesn't work, it makes retailers drop the product lines and cut support. Privateer Press went down a similar route with a selection of important online only models and it caused alot of friction with retailers. There's a major issue with retailers wasting shelf space on models a significant portion of their gaming community already has. I handle the Infinity orders for a LGS, easily 90% of the Infinity product they move is all pre-order based month to month. I rarely have to order older models, and I only need to restock the general shelf stock every couple of months, that's usually down to a player has decided to expand into a new sectorial and I need to replace things. The value in that shelf stock is that it advertises the game to a new customer, who after they buy in get on the month to month pre-order train. If CB did what you suggest the LGS would basically lose all of their Infinity sales and make it not really cost effective to bother stocking Infinity over just using the shelf space for a different product.
There are likely a number of factors driving this: CB molds in smaller pieces to both improve part details (as evidenced by CB splitting the head on the Vostok to solve the seam issue) and also because larger parts take longer to cool. This is exacerbated by silicone molds (since they are insulating), so I'm assuming that if CB is molding in China, they are least paying for aluminum molds. Silicone molds are injected at much lower pressures than matched die aluminum molds, this means you can use a smaller injection screw and smaller hydraulic clamp to hold the mold closed during injection if your machine is designed exclusively for silicone. Its possible that the Siocast machines just don't have the injection and clamping pressures needed to mold a much larger single piece parts. It may also be a capacity concern at CB. If they are spooling up to start Siocast production on a regular basis, they may not have the machine capacity available to take on a surge of production that comes with large limited runs like tag raid appears to be. If they have a contract manufacturer who can handle the tool production, part production, and packaging, I expect it would be much cheaper to hire that company out for a few months, rather than CB buying new equipment or interrupting their regular production schedule.
Same. The Aristeia stuff was already too much, even before Defiance. I'd rather Infinity stay Infinity and not "Infinity + whatever we released this season... actually, all seasons to date, can't cancel units or players will get pissy". Isn't that basically what Mantic did? IIRC, retailers hated that and many refused to stock their stuff.
The molds are A5+ size, and no idea how thick they can be. Models would need to be split, maybe same, maybe more than PVC. Maybe import some Chinese for glueing instead of sewing. Or maybe create easy parts and some rigs (half way to automatization), so assembly can be done at Western salaries like other PVC things.
Thank you for explaining! I'm not too enthusiastic of seeing another company that I like to continue depending on Chinese supply and production, but apparently half the world still does so. Yes please. We have enough profiles coming from A! and honestly, it is too much. Defiance wasn't that bad, just a few characters, some of which fit into the new sectorials - O-12 and Kosmoflot, so it was not noticeable. But now we're about to see a bunch of TAG profiles, a bunch of "support HI"...
That was supposedly the reason they did Aristeia in China in single piece model. Thing is, doesn't matter if you produce your game to catter to the board game players if you don't use new distributors that can reach those players. I know stores specialized in board games that had not heard of Aristeia before, cause it's distributed through wargames distributors.
Exactly. Experienced the same thing here. I know a board game / trading card game designer who owns a well-known store in a town at the German-Swiss border. He heard about the game but doesn't have it in the store and never played it. An important thing as well: Infinity Warcors focus on Infinity. Most of them are not interested in Aristeia!. And I searched all the big German YouTube board game channels for videos about Aristeia!... just a single small one featured it. And only a few tabletop channels did review it as well with DICED being the only one featuring it more than in just one video. Same for the biggest German Facebook group about board games. Just a few posts and comments but... and this should give CB a thought: ONLY positive ones. If you search for Super Fantasy Brawl however, you will get a lot of reviews. Maybe at some day in the future CB should do a reboot and send free copies to the biggest board game YouTubers in the world and at the same time reevaluate their marketing approach for board games for future projects like cooperating with a board game distributor.
For Super Fantasy Brawl, I don't know for other countries, but in France they paid the biggest youtubers to do advertising for them (but especially the one covering warhammer which had a decisive effect), which created a very big community in France. Sending free copies is not enough. Speaking of Diced, there's the latest interview with Bostria.
Interesting and hard forced marketing since (larger) YouTubers get money from their videos as well. But maybe this is the only way nowadays.
There are "side games"? Anything that gets pushed via a kickstarter gets put on ignore for me. It's not that I don't have faith in that system - I don't have any faith, period - but KS as a "pre-order" system for me is like a duck on a bicycle.
you mean KS as a "order" system. I don't like it either and it is considered before I back something.
Reminds me of that one guy who was so in love with the new (at the time) Kum bikes that he made like 30 conversions, putting anything he could on those bikes and a few things he couldn't, like a pair of Nasmats. I have friendly stores known to order "complete bundles" of KS releases and sell them at a markup. I have no problem paying someone extra to get the stuff right after I pay and avoid the risk of miserable failures. And if that means doom for the company releasing that... well, at this point I have very little sympathy for KS release model left, so good riddance I guess.
