[David Johansen]

Yeah, kickstarter's weird. Most game stores need the month to pay that the distributors give them. They then pay by credit card and have another month to pay. This gives a two month window to turn over the product and make something off it. Any thing that takes longer than that needs to be blown out and blown out fast to keep cash flowing or they quickly get into a death spiral. This is why stuff that iterates regularly like comics or Magic cards work so well for the business model. The problem with kickstarter is that it ties up capital for at least a year on an outright gamble of completion. Add to that that the average retailer pledge is $500 USD and it's an awful lot of money to tie up on a product that might never arrive and might have sold out the interest in in on the kickstarter. Though that does create a weird situation where it's the promotional items and add ons that you can sell rather than the core game.


Having tried to support lines in detail and promote those lines for seven years I can only tell you that it didn't work for me. You just wind up with too much dead product. Sometimes you find an opportunity to sell off that dead product at a profit. The collapse of Alien Dungeon created an opportunity to sell out all my All's Quiet On The Martian Front stock a couple years ago and now Prodos dropping the Warzone Resurrection line has given me an opportunity to clear out that product. But these situations are the exception not the norm. The simple reality is that there are a handful of evergreen lines in the industry and everything else is single instance these days.