So the recent 9th age Kickstarter campaign failed to fund. Any thoughts on why?

[elessar2590 18207xp 2]

@redben a big reason a lot of people in my area didn’t back it was that the TV series would have been over before we got the game. After the kickstarter finished it was announced that the series was going to be delayed a year and so a few of use went out and bought some stuff.

Plenty of people play rank and file games so I don’t really see that as being a huge issue. As Rank and File go it’s very tame. Set unit sizes of less than 20, plenty of heroes and a very strong IP plus everything was card driven.

It’s not fair to compare two Boardgames to a Miniatures game. Boardgames are far more popular and regularly get huge support on KS because they tap into a giant base of both “Hardcore” and “Part Time” gamers whereas any miniatures game loses a lot of appeal to “Part Timers”.  Part Time doesn’t mean not proper gamers or anything like that just people who choose not to go to the effort of painting minis, building terrain and everything else that comes with tabletop gaming.

[mecha82Participant 10037xp 0]

It’s unfortunate truth that not every KS can succeed with so many going on at same time all year around. Sadly 9th Age met this fate as well. But this also comes down to bad marketing because there needs to be reason for backers for get into it beyond good looking miniatures and this one lacked that.

[limburger 21672xp 0]

I’d say that the GoT-game did pretty well considering where the tv-series was at that time of that kickstarter.
It might have done better if they had launched when the series was at maximum mainstream popularity instead of when it did.

(never mind that there already was a boardgame that focussed on the diplomacy/intrigue aspect of the series)

OTOH … I think the media industry has yet to understand how (board)games can help sell an IP (when handled with care).
They barely understand how to make good (video)game cross-overs/tie-ins as is.
Boardgames have yet to go beyond the ‘monopoly’-clone threshold as far as licensing deals appear to be done (Star Wars being the one exception).

And I kind of doubt that 5 times kickstarter target can ever be considered ‘doing bad’.
That’s like the video game industry classifying games as failures/’not meeting expectations’ when the sales figures for a titles don’t match that of the top 3 in the industry when realisticly speaking they ought to been happy with half of their actual sales.

ASOIF may not be a traditional mass battle game, but (IMHO) it may represent the format that manages to attract the most new gamers to the genre.

9th age is missing only one basic ingredient : the sales pitch that attracts new blood to the genre.

Games don’t sell because the mechanics are perfect.
They sell because they either have an unique selling point that makes them irresistable to new players or they successfully target an unexplored target audience (like Nintendo did for game consoles with the Wii).

[danlee 22434xp 1]

The kickstarter was not for 9th Age. It was just for models that had been designed with 9th age in mind. I was only able to figure that out after watching the videos on OTT though. It was not very clear from the kickstarter page itself. It is almost as if the people running the campaign didn’t realize that the 9th age project is not well known or understood in general. I’ve been aware it existed since its inception as it was mentioned on Warhammer Fantasy podcasts at the time but I never followed it. I always assumed it would run out of momentum and become irrelevant.

 

That said I did back this kickstarter. I liked the models and ironically in Age of Sigmar it is very easy to take small forces like this and incorporate them into your larger Order or Death forces as an allied detachment, which is what I planned to do.

 

The models are already available for sale on the manufacturer’s website by the way. The kickstarter’s aim was to improve the packaging so that they could go to retail in stores. The models themselves are already designed and cast.

[onlyonepinman 18060xp 2]

10 grand is a lot of money just to improve the packaging of an existing product and probably gives people even less incentive to back when they can get those miniatures at any time.  I had assumed maybe they were changing the materials they were being cast in.

So far I can see two main failures here:

1) No urgency.  The Kickstarter wasn’t offering people anything they couldn’t already buy or buy any time they want.  This would have been exacerbated by running the campaign at Christmas – had it been run mid year, the discount on the miniatures bundles might have tempted a few more people.

2) No Unique Selling point. The miniatures failed to stand out from the rest of the market either in terms of design or cost.  Nice sculpts but not massively original and fairly pricey.

I don’t think it failed specifically because 9th Age is a rank and file Wargame; £10,000 isn’t a huge amount of money in the grand scheme of things, but if you can’t make people feel like they NEED to back right now or miss out on something then I think you’re always going to struggle.  And for a rank and file game, there are comparable options available in hard plastic for less money.  I wonder if maybe they just haven’t understood their audience?  Although 9th Age is a successor to WFB, it’s not limited to a single miniatures range and never has been.  That’s probably part of the attraction in that you can create a large army in 28mm for significantly less than you could buying GW miniatures just by using historicals or companies like Mantic and now warlord. How much of market is there in the 9th Age community for a more expensive product such as this?  I’m sure that there is a market for them, but is it big enough to justify a Kickstarter?

This isn’t me having a dig either, as a former Bretonnian player, I really like those Equitaine models – but they are quite pricey and I doubt I could afford to build a full army of them.

[embracraigParticipant 427xp 2]

Quoting from the very top of the Kickstarter page:

Who is the 9th Age for?
The 9th Age is for experienced and veteran players, who enjoy a challenge and want to play in the largest and most competitive system in the world. With the best players represent their country at the ETC. As around 40 countries send their 8 man teams to claim the championship. Do you have what it takes? if you think so, then this for you!

I don’t think this appeals to as a big a group as TMS (or the wider 9th Age player group) thinks it does. Competitive players are a fairly small subset of wargamers compared to those that just meet up with friends and throw dice around – claiming that your system is the best system for the best of those competitive players in the country probably isn’t getting a lot of people onboard. They then have to point out later on that the KS isn’t actually for the system at all, it’s just for models – why not start out by saying that you’re improving the 3 ranges of models instead, since that’s what you’re actually raising money for?

Other issues – £55 is a lot for 14 models (the Equitaine faction). The knights are nice, but the damsel’s horse is… odd. There are plenty of ranges of plastic knights where I can get more for less money (and to my eyes, the Fireforge knights are much nicer).

On the other 2 ranges – with so much competition out there, is there really a need for 2 more undead factions at a pretty high price point? There’s maybe a market among the oldhammer type fans, but I think they’d need to be pretty fantastic models to make it work. The Undying Dynasties maybe have their niche for people missing their Tomb Kings, but I’d honestly expect that most of them already have most of the models they need.

[limburger 21672xp 1]

I suspect that these creators of these minis are so into 9th age that they forgot that as a kickstarter they needed to sell it to outsiders …

In general kickstarters that sell miniatures tend to put those front and center when promoting the campaign. Rules are often treated as secondary.

You can see it even in their own attempts. Their ‘Vampire army’ kickstarter managed to achieve its goal.

Both of their 9th Age focussed campaigns failed …

It also looks like they haven’t even begun delivering their Vampire army kickstarter …

I’d say there is a lesson to be learned here and I hope TMS do so for their own sake.

[tankkommanderParticipant 6411xp 3]

So it seems GW did know what they were doing when they killed off the old WHFB.

[onlyonepinman 18060xp 2]

@tankcommander I’m not sure that GW’s decision to end WHFB is really anything to do with the failure of the 9th Age Kickstarter, I think the Kickstarter failed on its own shortcomings.  GW, if they had wanted to, could likely have made WHFB or similar rank and file game work, perhaps not with the senior management they had at the time but certainly they could do so now.

I think TMS just didn’t present the Kickstarter correctly. It wasn’t very clear what it was; it wasn’t for 9th age, it was for some miniatures that could be used with 9th age if you want. It was also not actually creating miniatures, all of those miniatures arr currently available, as far as I can tell, so if you want them you can buy them any time you want, perhaps at a time when you don’t have Christmas presents to buy. But I also think perhaps TMS have also misjudged the 9th age audience many of whom probably don’t want to buy the expensive miniatures like those on the Kickstarter when they can get more models for less money elsewhere.

[limburger 21672xp 0]

@tankcommander : just because GW didn’t think mass battle games could be profitable that doesn’t mean they won’t be (again). Perhaps all that is really needed is a change of scale …

Besides … the ‘A song of Ice and Fire’ kickstarter kind of shows that there is an interest in these types of games.
What really matters is the sales pitch.

9th Age simply needs a better company to market the system.

[tankkommanderParticipant 6411xp 0]

ASoI&F how many people actually play the game? And how many are just collecting the figures?

[onlyonepinman 18060xp 0]

I think most people buying ASoIaF are buying it for the game.  If it was based on the TV series I might be inclined to say the opposite but it’s not.  Being based on the books, i don’t think either the game or the range of miniatures would survive if people were just buying for the miniatures and not for the game itself because the majority of the miniatures are just regular foot soldiers which could easily be represented by models from any fantasy or historical range. The fact they have an IP brand associated with them isn’t, IMO, enough of a reason to buy them and sales of the characters alone wouldn’t be profitable enough to continue producing, not when Dark Sword already produce a range of characters models in the same scale – in fact weren’t Dark Sword involved in the making of the miniatures for the game?  To me it’s not convincing enough to say that people are just buying it for the models and not for the game.  I suspect that the people buying ASoIaF may not be as numerous as people buying AoS or Warmachine but they are fervent fans of the books who are buying the game because it’s based on a particular IP and they’re interested in both the game and the miniatures as a complete package.

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