Also, Please Engage In The Democratic Process
Note to all the robocallers that have plagued me this election season: I have kept a mental running tally of how many times each of you has bothered me. Whoever has the fewest Annoyed Gary tickmarks gets my vote.
- Things to have: Zach Weinersmith and Howard “Evil Twin” Tayler both moved outside the usual print/t-shirt/book collection merch axis, with announcements of an iDevice app and a Kickstarting board game, respectively. Particularly impressive is the boardgame, which is sitting at just under 50% of goal around 14 hours into the campaign, despite what I would have pegged as an unusual and potentially hampering reward structure¹. I’ll have to rework my personal model of what works for Kickstarting².
Since we’re talking about iStore iApps for iDevices, I mentioned back in May about a gent named Steven Mausch who was building a webcomics reading app in the iPad that didn’t scrape or steal content from creators. Mausch writes to let us know that the app, ComicsPanel, is now available for your consideration. Somebody with a fondleslab let us know how you like it.
- Places to go: Are you on a continent? Then you can see The PhD Movie without leaving that arbitrary geographical unit. Seven continents of screenings, kids, from Minnesota to McMurdo³ and all points between. If you’re specifically in North America, even more specifically in Toronto, the most dangerous man in webcomics is having a stealth reading of surprise material tomorrow night. Details available for those that have Facebook.
- Things to see: Magnolia Porter4, as previously noted, is drawing 50 Achewood characters in 50 days, and just dropped #s 48 and 49: Ramses Luther Smuckles and Cartilage Head. These have been really, really great, and it’s going to be a pleasure to see who the 50th will be, tinged with the sadness that we don’t get any more of these. If we all die tonight because of the close-shave chunk of rock heading for us, not knowing who #50 is might be the biggest disappointment of the fall of civilization.
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¹ Approximately 75% of pledgers have opted for the 2nd tier reward, which includes a copy of the finished game at the $55 level (the first tier gets you nothing but good feelings, for a minimum of $1, so we’re really talking about the first reward tier). The thing is, most of the higher tiers predominantly distinguish themselves from the $55 tier by adding in more copies of the boardgame.
² It’s based around on providing unique and progressively more desirable rewards for more money, but this one opted for a quantity approach (mostly — mixed in with the additional copies are additional game contents that would otherwise not be available or available much later to the general public, so it’s really about quantity and time).
³ Which seems to be the place in Antarctica for webcomickry.
4 She kicks mens asses, and she votes.
Kickstarter boardgames are a different beast than Kickstarter books. Still, I don’t think you’re wrong on your personal model of what works and how. There’s one key caveat – audience.
If you have the built-in audience, you can break the rules of Kickstarter’s normal business model. Personally, I think that was a risk that I was not willing to take, so I went with the progressively desirable rewards, and had a fair bit of success with it.
By Darren J. Gendron on 11.08.11 11:51 pm
Yeah, I was quite sad that the kickstarter model for their game was so… sub-par, compared to every other kickstarter offering I’ve seen. I suspect there is still plenty of an audience for it to succeed, of course, but it was unfortunate – I went in expecting to go for a higher tier, given the comic is something I very much am a fan of, but couldn’t bring myself to do so when I would basically get nothing out of it.
By Myth on 11.09.11 10:41 am
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