The diminishing returns of Kickstarter campaigns is, I think, far more likely to be related to market saturation than the number of failed projects (which as a percentage is actually incredibly low).  Kickstarter has enabled some absolutely amazing games to be brought to life, but I don’t think it’s done anything to grow the market in any significant way, certainly not the miniatures market.   So it is, for the most part, the same people backing now as 5 years ago and without growth in the market that was a bubble that couldn’t keep inflating lest it burst.  I don’t think it has burst and I don’t think it will, more likely we will see a few companies go under as the market plateaus, but I don’t really think we will see it shrink very much.  I also don’t think we have seen the last “mega Kickstarter” that reaches hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.  Mythic Battles Pantheon went to £2m and then £800k and Monolith are already planning Mythic Battles Ragnarok, a Norse version of the game fully compatible with Pantheon.  Given the amount of fan-wanking Vikings and all things related to them get, does anyone think people aren’t already marketing organs on the black market to get in on Ragnarok?  I think Ragnarok will quite easily breach the £1m mark again.  So what we’re really seeing is a competitive market with some established products and companies into which is getting more difficult to break into. However I think the diminishing returns has scuppered the ND business plan and possibly CMON who will no doubt need to massively rethink their strategy.

I don’t think Ninja Division’s demise will have a significant impact on Kickstarter at all.  I think it will have an impact on a few people’s spending habits but they definitely won’t be a majority.  Sure, there’s a few people out there saying they’re never backing Kickstarter again but they’re a small, vocal group who thanks for to the power of the Internet have been brought to a single place at the same time which creates the illusion that they are a majority when this isn’t really the case.  Not only will the Ninja Division failure not affect Kickstarter but they also won’t be the last failure.  It will also most likely affect the business practices of companies like Archon who subcontract casting or other production work.

Also, there were definitely some red flags around Ninja Division at the point they launched Star Finder.  There were already rumours that they were using successive Kickstarters to fund previous Kickstarters.  They were also involved with the ill fated Robotech game.  This very much directed my pledge – there were lots of miniatures that I liked but only a handful of them I was prepared to gamble on.  So I made a very small pledge to get just the ones I really wanted – sadly it looks like my gamble has failed but importantly, it was an amount I could cope with losing.