Age of Annihilation - Backer Trend and Discussion

[chas]

Unlike other crowdfunders, which open their campaigns with elaborate information about their offerings, Hasbro seems to be setting things up after they launch, which has surprised all of us who are unfamiliar with their own Haslab platform. Therefore they are suffering by comparison. So we'll see if their upcoming "media blitz" and new backer reveals on Age of Annihilation on their offering page itself help raise the backer numbers for funding before November 15. To us, as we used to say in the old days, it certainly seems a heck of a way to run a railroad!

[IAmBatman]

The other metaphor for this type of thing is building the airplane on the way down.

[rudyvalentine]

For all my head scratching, this looks to be the day the campaign hits half a million! On day one I had serious doubt, but just a few days later I’m coming around to believe this will happen.

I had a similar collection to what @RobertDD describes but after years of hardly touching it I slowly let it go to make space and buy new games, not ever imagining the game would come back.

Now here it is and I still own the original master set, a couple terrain expansions and a few of my favorite heroes and squads. Enough to still have a good time.

I’m on the fence now. I’m hoping as the campaign continues it becomes more and more tempting but like Bats said I think it will take some design reveals to really get my hype level up.

[OEAO]

This feels pretty relevant to the conversation in here.


Mike and Ken walk through the current Hasbro Pulse campaign and what their hopes are for changes in the coming weeks.

https://castersofvalhalla.wixsite.co...ocEv8O51B8cYBU

[IAmBatman]

Listening right now. The being sold as a toy not a game point is spot on.

[Finrod]

Originally Posted by chas

Unlike other crowdfunders, which open their campaigns with elaborate information about their offerings, Hasbro seems to be setting things up after they launch, which has surprised all of us who are unfamiliar with their own Haslab platform.

Here's the thing, though... I AM familiar with Haslab. I followed the GI Joe campaigns very closely.

Hasbro did this with those campaigns: Released a ton of relevant information and some stretch goals. Didn't hide a single detail about the main toy involved. The only details left unanswered were the stretch goals. And they released the details of those once a week in a regular schedule. Everything was organized, detailed, and well publicized.

Now to be fair here, they did NOT release a bunch of stuff ahead of time, which Avalon Hill did for us on Discord. But neither did they promise "we'll give you more details at an undisclosed later time."

This is a very odd campaign. I'm encouraged that it's gotten almost a quarter of the way there now, but... still very concerned.

[IAmBatman]

Yeah, the campaign itself is going ... OK. It just seems like that's the case despite itself. A better run campaign (Mike and Ken's podcast lays out what I mean by that pretty well) and I truly believe this could have raised twice as much already.

[orgsbane]

A few quotes from the Avalon Bill on discord for anyone considering backing for the terrain. Hopefully we’ll get the full details today.

“I'm pretty sure the picture does not show it all“

In reply to confirmation that we were not given the specifics on terrain: “Gotcha, that's my mission for today then (other than finding ~14k more backers)”

[rudyvalentine]

Not following the discord to hear directly from the team, but any word if the box is really going to be that ugly? I understand the painted minis issue, but are they just fundamentally against all color?

[IAmBatman]

Great question

[SuperSamyon]

This campaign is one of the oddest I've seen and I can tell Hasbro hadn't figured out Discord yet. Earlier, one of the marketing guys posted saying "if we get 400 backers in any 24 hour period I'll hunt down a character stat and share them." The backlash was immediate since players were questioning why they are making it harder on everyone to get this campaign funded by withholding information. At that point I closed Discord since I was so perturbed by how everything is going especially since I'm still waiting to learn about the new gameplay before I back.

But when I went back to screen capture the message, I saw that he later apologized for it saying it was meant to poke fun at something else. Had I not gone back and researched before I created this post, I wouldn't have known it was a joke and still thought that was their position. Discord moves so fast and bad jokes leave their sting for a long time. I'm sure the guy didn't mean any harm but he and the rest of the team have to know how much this means to a lot of people and any flippant comments can really derail their efforts. People are burning the midnight oil trying to make this a success so you want to show you are taking this as seriously as your fans are.

Talk about not knowing how to read a room. At least it was all a misunderstanding.

[IAmBatman]

I had to leave that Discord. You couldn't have a conversation that included any criticism without being attacked, so I figured it wasn't worth my mental health to stick around there.