Firelock Launch Firestarters To Crowdfund Quick Expansions To Their Range
January 25, 2019 by dracs
Firelock Games have announced that they are launching a new service called Firestarters, letting them seek crowdfunding for smaller items that might not be worth a full Kickstarter on their own, but which people still want to see on the table.
The first of these Firestarters is looking to help create European pikemen, brought over by colonies in the early part of the century to defend against the cavalry of other European forces.
What is a Firestarter?
On their website, Firelock put out an announcement letting everyone know exactly what to expect from a Firestarter:
It is our way of crowdfunding small-run products that fans of Firelock games would like to have, but would be difficult for us to create because of the initial cost. We still have many regular releases planned for our games that will be dropped throughout the year. We have seen great success with our larger campaign releases and we hope Firestarters will become a way for us to quickly expand a game’s world. It’s a way for fans to show support for the products they want to add to their collection.
When a Firestarter campaign has been launched, we will accept pre-orders for the item being crowdfunded. If enough pre-orders are placed within the time period of the campaign, we will manufacture the item. The goal of each campaign will always be the cost of creating the new product in question.
Personally, I think small, dedicated crowdfunding services like this are very useful to help companies expand their product line, without having to necessarily run large Kickstarter campaigns every time they wish to bring in something new.
I hope that we will get to see Firelock's European Pikemen, though, not knowing much of the history, I'll be curious to see how they fit in with a game that has such a mix of naval skirmishes, as well as on-land combat.
What units would you like to see Firelock come out with?
beefeaters ?
vegetarians ? 😉
? Violent Veg ?
that’s what you get when you don’t eat your meat 😉
Lol.
http://images.linnlive.com/53837890a3b4865cfb9a69156de55d2c/c4d48efe-95af-4fba-9ac6-6d7b607838dc.jpg
Twisted Firestarter?
Chilli Firefarter? oO
I’m all for more Blood and Plunder!
I will back anything firlock does at this point. Blood & Plunder is an amazing game and I look forward to Oak & Iron. These will be a fine addition to B&P but I would love to see more Native Americans and, shall we say riff raf. The lost souls and misfits that were not allowed a place in ‘proper’ society and so came to piracy because it was all that was left to them. We more sea dogs and scum
I’m tempted to back them as well, but my backlog says ‘no’ …
It definitely is a system/setting that deserves to be as big as the WW2 era systems are.
I think this is a bery honest adaption of the standard KS project and from a business model perspective is a low risk way of funding product development while presumably giving the backers/purchasers more protection through credit card protection etc.
We’ve seen similar with Northstar’s Nickstarter campaigns. Once you’ve established your brand, reputation and range then this maintai s the ongoing conversation with your customer without the hype etc of KS such as the crazy psychology used by some over SGs.
Not a new idea but as mentioned a lot of companies are doing this now and seems to work really well
I much prefer this way of doing things to an uber-successful Kickstarter with lots of stretch goals. You don’t get the same value, usually (i.e. less free stuff) but its much more sustainable for smaller companies in the long run, and I think thats far more important.
Yeah, Pendraken managed to do a successful non-Kickstarter for some 10mm Napoleonics so this kind of thing can work for even relatively niche products.
Kickstarter itself seems like a very good marketing tool but the temptation to cater to the psychology of the Kickstarter community can be quite dangerous.
They did a really nice one for Mongols a few years back. Eureka do something similar with their 100 and 300 clubs. That is when they that amount of orders they make the figures