Planet Pioneer Kickstarter Project Launch

In the "Enlistment Bonus Rewards" table, the rank badges look super good. I did not *analyze* them in detail - but they look WAY COOL!

$600; Why such a low goal?

Wow!

Super slick presentation on the project Voodoodog, outstanding work on the visual presentation and the thematic space mission for funding progression is really cool.

I like the idea of the $600 funding as well. I agree that lots of people have the impression that Kickstarter is a route to high income dreams and it really isn’t. In my eyes it’s about securing the necessary amount of funding to meet production and distribution costs.

Some projects appear to pick their required funding goal out of a hat. And as you say, a lot of interesting projects have fallen by the wayside, simply because they set their financial expectations to high and didn’t meet their target.

I think more projects would be successful if they put the millionaire pipe dreams to one side and structured their funding requests in accordance with production costs. Each game will cost me X so I need to ask for 500 X to get the game produced and anything else is gravy. I can always run another project for a second print run when the game is out their attracting visibility.

The financial returns of a project are also a little different in respect to kickstarter funding to engage publishing. Kickstarter is always described as a crowd funding platform. However, it also serves a role as a pre-order sales point (with lower outgoings for publisher and distributor profit percentages).

The funders contribute something like the RRP for the game and that goes towards meeting the funding goal. However, producing the game doesn’t cost the RRP only a percentage of it. So if you attract 10 people who are prepared to pay $40 for a game (that costs $5 to produce) you can actually cover the production costs of 80 games and not the 10 you will be sending out. Obviously it’s a little lower than that, since you have to factor in promotional costs, production expenses like artwork, time, and Kickstarters percentage.

So, if you want to produce 500 games as an initial run you wouldn’t need to ask for $20,000 dollars to break even you would only need to ask for $2500 to break even (less other costs). And it doesn’t stop there, because funding can always exceed the asked for amount.

I think more projects would be successful if people asked for the amount of necessary funding they need to get X games to market instead of viewing the platform as a dream fuelled, jackpot millionaire maker.

Having said all that, the scales could be tipped by a funding figure set to low. Once funding is secured potential investors might consider the job done and refrain from contributing. If the success of a project is almost there, but not quite there, this can lead to people contributing. I suspect this is one of the reasons you sometimes see last minute escalations as the day of success/failure reckoning draws near.

So, and I’m guessing here, the value to set for a project would be the amount of funding required to cover production plus a little extra - along with a number of tempting additional funding goals to move things beyond the break even point or initial production number.

You can’t make a game with less money than you need to get the ball rolling, but if the ball rolls further than you expected you can always increase production to cover the shortfall.

Back to Planet Pioneers, I noticed a couple of things in the rules that might benefit from an alteration in the final edition.

‘Separate all Base Station cards from deck. One per player. This is your starting point. Set aside any unused Base Station cards and out of play in a Discard Pile.’

‘next to or above your Base Station.’

‘This ends of your turn’

‘Third round can play Value 3 or less.’

Proposals

Separate all the Base Station cards from the main deck. Shuffle them and deal one to each player, to act as the colony start points. The remaining Base Station cards will serve no further use and should be placed back in the game box.

Above my Base Station, but the picture clearly shows the placement grid extending beneath it?

This is the end of your turn

In the third round they can play a Value 3 card or less. (Value with a capital when the other instances don’t)

In subsequent rounds the players can play cards of any Value, but they can’t replicate any identical cards that have been placed in their colonies previously, unless those cards where destroyed by a meteor and are no longer active.

The other players then have one final turn before the game ends.

I think these amendments might make the text flow a little better, although it may mess up the layout in terms of size (and the ability to fit the rules on cards). You could maybe free up some space by removing the helpful TV tray suggestion or something to provide more room.

If it’s possible at this stage, a review might lead to additional contributors jumping on board. Independent comments can sometimes make the difference between a yes and a no.