Blame elections…. that’s a new one XD

I just had a quick look at it and $100 for that core box is ridiculous it deserves to fail, it should have been $50-60 max. Another cash grab on an over milked IP.

KM’s treatment of the HP license for the HP game was a disaster. From a boardgame perspective, the miniatures were too brittle for a gaming audience, and the combat gameplay was pretty much “Harry Potter fights a bunch of spiders”. In hindsight, HP isn’t the same sort of IP as DC and Marvel. HP is certainly not a franchise about fighting and combat, and I’d say that a HP resin miniature has to be marketed particularly so that it reaches its target audience. Maybe they should have just released a series of miniatures? Dunno.

Looks like it’ll restart in a week, but who knows if they’ve learned anything from their original HP game mistakes. November and December are bad months for a KS because of the holiday season (Amazon is particularly aggressive with the boardgame market) and sometimes taxes (you have to offset income in one year with expenses in the other).

> there’s the fact that they’re dealing with corporate entities and license holders who don’t have a clue about the tabletop market,

Ah, right. And, if WB (or whoever owns the license) is anything like 20th Century Fox, they’re going to demand but not approve every step of the production in a timely manner, resulting in cost overruns and backers who may not get their stuff. IPs are a yellow flag. You don’t know if the licensor is going to cause problems with the project.

just because the project is ‘ready to go’ that doesn’t mean all of its components have been approved.
The Streetfighter game had to endure a ton of delays because Capcom couldn’t handle the quantity of art that the developers sent them to approve. The Evil Dead boardgame endured similar stuff. And I suspsect Aliens vs Predators suffered post funding issues with the approval proces as well.

They could have been very unlucky with pre-production minis (brittle resin shipped half way across the world?), but IMHO a game at that stage should be judged on its gameplay first and not on the actual components.

I doubt a mere one week delay is going to salvage anything other than a complete cockup in PR.

Reading through the kickstarter I’m more worried about their mastery of the English language :
” It is not as easy as explained, but it is true that our marketing campaign in US experimented unespected problems. As it is also true the fact that we are replaning the KS campaign. Best regards.”

Apparently their marketing was USA only …

The suggestions for lowering the funding goal are just plain silly.
If you need 500k to start production it makes no sense to set your target at 250k and pray you reach the stretchgoals to get it done. Your margins for failure become even smaller … and they’re unlikely to be huge if this is your first product.

Same applies to the pledge levels themselves.
If 100-150$ is the bare minimum they’d need to produce the game then lowering the pledge levels is only going to hurt them long term.

1$ pledge levels effectively mean that you’re gambling on having enough money post launch to order the extra resources needed to afford the extra games you need to produce. And because you won’t know what and how much those 1$ pledges are going to actually order you can’t plan for it until the pledgemanager closes. At which point you may be doomed as you’re locked in your budget for resources and may have to renegotiate with suppliers that may not have the ability to do so (production capacity is as much a resource as materials!). To say nothing of logistics which are a whole world of problems these days due to the Event (stay indoors!).

Short campaigns need not be a problem provided if and only if(!) their marketing is super agressive from pre-launch.
Given that they’ve clearly failed that … I’m not sure if they can recover, unless they hope that the cancelling helped.
I see cancelled kickstarters as a red flag, because it means they may not have the basics under control … so how would they deal with real set backs post launch ?

I did watch a play though of the game… more about trying to grab cards then zooming around having fun. I guess in my eyes a “blood bowl” style of game was what would have caught my eye….

> I am sad this KS has been cancelled as it seemed like the perfect next game for me and my son – who at only 7 is turning into an avid gamer and huge Harry Potter fan.

Well, it’s not like there isn’t a ton of HP merchandise out there aimed at a young market. Amazon has over 800 results for boys 6-12, although I’m seeing only two Quidditch games. BGG lists several HP games. IIRC, Hogwarts Battle was well-received. Given KM’s mistreatment of the HP license for their first game, I don’t think there’s much to look forward to for their second. As someone who’s been burned on an IP KS, IMO, the *last* thing you should consider when backing a KS is the IP.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=harry+potter+toys+for+boys+6-12&crid=38EQ3YCPZ9HKM&sprefix=Harry+potter+toys%2Caps%2C232&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-a-p_7_17

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=quidditch&rh=n%3A165793011&dc&crid=R7BAYV1MH94F&qid=1604835484&rnid=2941120011&sprefix=quiddi%2Caps%2C229&ref=sr_nr_n_8

https://boardgamegeek.com/geeksearch.php?action=search&objecttype=boardgame&q=harry%20potter

https://www.amazon.com/hogwarts/s?k=hogwarts&rh=n%3A166220011&dc&qid=1604835752&rnid=2941120011&ref=sr_nr_n_9