KickFail: Welcome to Mortison, U.S.A.

RPG Kickstarter projects are such a mixed bag. Generally, those with products at or nearly complete deliver a few months late. Frankly, even the best organized projects are delayed by weeks or a few months. Rarely one actually shows up on time. Welcome to Mortiston, USA: An All American Zombie Apocalypse by Scrying Eye Games is not one of the rare or uncommon ones. The delivery is now 15 months beyond the original delivery date of June 2012. To be fair, I did get the PDF of the supplement around the due date even though I already HAD a copy of the PDF.

What I haven’t seen is the softcover, the hardcover, or the miscellaneous perk items (Extended Electronic Package supplements, minis, postcards, or additional map sets). I received absolutely nothing beyond what I could have gotten without backing the kickstarter project. Backing this particular Kickstarter project was foolish. In hindsight, the amount raised was never going to cover the costs of the promised materials.

Where it all went wrong based on sporadic updates… (in no particular order)

• From the start
• Printer problems
• More printer problems… but oh yeah order a softcopy off our website
• Cover problems with the printer
• Woops, burned all that cash going to conventions
• Oh shit, its over budget.
• Hang on, we are working on another solution (meanwhile we’ll issue a different product release on our website)
• Personal Illness
• Holy shit, businesses have to PAY TAXES?!??

I grew tired of re-reading the various updates. When you are digging a year into your email archives to figure out what’s happening, you know the project is going nowhere fast. Taking an overall look, it is pretty obvious that the common mistakes were made by a small publisher — a) underestimate costs, b) over promise on non-core rewards, c) fail to manage the core deliveries and likely d) burn through raised funding on other affairs not related to the project.

I do not expect to see anything beyond the original PDF. At a tad less than $3500 worth of funding, getting a softcover out the door was speculative. A hard cover a bit beyond speculative. The stretch goals were absurdly beyond reach for the funding. I back projects for the core gaming material not the extra oddities.

Three bad conventions trashed our budget, both for the business and personally. In three weeks we’ll be doing the taxes for the year. We’re using our own money to get the printing done and shipped out.

It might be time to punt. Use your own money to refund what you cannot deliver. In fact, it is probably cheaper to issue a refund than it is to continue down the path of futility.

We aren’t planning on doing any more Kickstarter’s. I’ll admit it makes me feel better to know larger companies like Steve Jackson Games and Reaper can have such major problems, too. The Kickstarter process just takes away too much time from everything else we should be doing.

Uhm, say what? It’s hard to issue an update every few weeks about some delay or another? What exactly is your billable time worth? If it is so valuable, I’d suggest going back to that, earning some cash, and refunding the funding population across the board. As for not doing anymore kickstarter projects, I commend you for not double dipping into the well. No matter if it was incompetence, ignorance or extremely bad luck, you have proven you cannot deliver on a project. I’d gladly blackball any new project you launch.

As promised, everyone will get everything. When we hit that “SUBMIT” button, we agreed to do that, and we will. Very late, but we’re still going to get everything out. Since we got burned for the first batch of Kickstarter edition books, the costs have gone up and so has the shipping. International shipping has almost doubled for some areas. The costs of the special edition books and shipping now totals to just over 300% of the initial budget.

Shipping ALWAYS goes up. I doubt it went up 300% in a year. You planned poorly. As for getting burned by a printer, it happens. Most businesses vet partners before engaging in business with them. There are multitudes of honorable printers in the world. You chose poorly.

You should just acknowledge failure on the project and return the money. Money you likely already spent but if, as you stated, you can spend out of pocket, it will be far cheaper than trying to deliver a product. Most businesses make poor choices on one occasion or another. Businesses that stay in business do not continue to throw good money after bad. Especially when they have spent other peoples money.

Either way, Scrying Eye Games is dead to me.