Age of Annihilation - Backer Trend and Discussion

[rudyvalentine]

Originally Posted by Muffinman

$2 million is fine, but the $250 minimum buy-in was completely insane. The original game was $40 with painted minis. I can get multiple other fantastic board games for the price of this one. If they had tiers, I (and a bunch of my friends) would have bought in. It makes no sense to only have one tier.

And regardless of your platform you need to be aware of what your competitors are doing. If you’re going for high quality minis and a price point like that, you’re going up against companies that know what they’re doing and have a proven formula for success. Any other publisher launched a campaign like that it would have been taken down in 48 hours.

[Dad_Scaper]

Originally Posted by Muffinman

$2 million is fine, but the $250 minimum buy-in was completely insane. The original game was $40 with painted minis. I can get multiple other fantastic board games for the price of this one. If they had tiers, I (and a bunch of my friends) would have bought in. It makes no sense to only have one tier.

You're not wrong, and I am taking your posts seriously, even though every single time I see your name my mind goes here:

YouTube

[Yodaking]

Yeah, it's the whole structure of the campaign that was the biggest problem.

I really think the free shipping idea was a big part of that. It's why they couldn't pivot to customer demand for something other than a single all in big box option. Once they committed to free shipping, they didn't want to send 15,000+ packages to 15,000+ different places, all weighing a different amount as people bought different amounts of stuff. So no $50 one off miniature or terrain sales. No $100 basic starter sets. No common squad add-ons in whatever multiple you wanted.

I don't know what the thinking was behind the free shipping idea to begin with. Considering the volatile price of fuel/oil at the moment, why wouldn't you just charge for shipping next year based on what the current cost environment is? If they really thought the free shipping was going to be a big selling point, they could have just offered free shipping on the single all-in package, with any add-ons generating their own shipping charges. Then if someone only wanted to pledge $100 of stuff, they are paying the shipping cost. The free shipping would then be seen as a perk for upgrading to the all-in level.

[caps]

Originally Posted by Yodaking

Yeah, it's the whole structure of the campaign that was the biggest problem.

I really think the free shipping idea was a big part of that. It's why they couldn't pivot to customer demand for something other than a single all in big box option. Once they committed to free shipping, they didn't want to send 15,000+ packages to 15,000+ different places, all weighing a different amount as people bought different amounts of stuff. So no $50 one off miniature or terrain sales. No $100 basic starter sets. No common squad add-ons in whatever multiple you wanted.

I don't know what the thinking was behind the free shipping idea to begin with. Considering the volatile price of fuel/oil at the moment, why wouldn't you just charge for shipping next year based on what the current cost environment is? If they really thought the free shipping was going to be a big selling point, they could have just offered free shipping on the single all-in package, with any add-ons generating their own shipping charges. Then if someone only wanted to pledge $100 of stuff, they are paying the shipping cost. The free shipping would then be seen as a perk for upgrading to the all-in level.

Don't all HasLabs have free shipping? I think that just boils down to limitations of the platform. As far as I know HeroQuest was the only offering they've ever done with multiple tiers, and they've never done an offering with add-ons. I don't think they even have the technical website infrastructure in place to support that.

[Hogg]

Shipping was separate on the HeroQuest Haslab. I paid around $25 for the shipping on a single mythic tier.

[Yodaking]

That does seem to be the case. They spent money creating the Haslab website when they decided they didn't want to pay the fees other crowdfunding sites charge. They didn't need the same level of complexity to sell one-off toys/collectables, so that makes sense. Surely they've recovered the cost of the initial website construction from the many successful Haslab campaigns they have had since then. Now they want to pivot and fund things other than one-off toys/collectables, including relaunching multi-component board games with an eye on ongoing sales. They should have spent the money to add the required complexity to the base website needed to accommodate that shift in direction. If they didn't see the long term value to improving the Haslab website to accommodate new uses for it, then they should have just let AH run the campaign on Kickstarter and paid them their cut for the better website/results. Kickstarter only gets a percentage of what is sold via the campaign, what's a few percentage points out of $2+ Million to a company like Hasbro? The next several years of direct sales made after the initial campaign ended would have been all Hasbro. Bringing back an ever expanding board game with years of potential sales is a long play, not a quick flip like one-off toys/collectibles are.

[ThrasherDarkrai]

Frankly, I'd be looking askance at the entire Haslab system if I was an executive at Hasbro right now; the AoA campaign is, what, the third unsuccessful Haslab campaign in a row? For that matter, I'm also convinced that Hasbro's poor track record with its recent Haslabs is probably symptomatic of larger problems plaguing Hasbro right now, with complaints about overpriced products being particularly pervasive. Judging by Reddit threads, people practically cheered when the Engine of Vengeance campaign failed (citing how expensive it was for what you were actually getting) and being released within this particular climate of dissatisfaction with Hasbro did the AoA campaign no favors, even if this was almost certainly something outside of Avalon Hill's control.

[Dad_Scaper]

Do I understand correctly that HasLab has flunked 5 campaigns in a row? Or something like that? I wasn't really paying attention, but I thought I saw that number out there.

[ThrasherDarkrai]

It's flunked five campaigns total, but it definitely hasn't flunked five in a row. There have been either three or four failed campaigns in a row (depending on when the Rancor campaign was). The very first failed Haslab was a life-size Cookie Monster that only got something like 600 backers over its funding period; apparently, it's so embarrassing that Hasbro no longer even has the Cookie Monster Haslab page on its site. Then the Rancor failed (with something else successful afterwards, I think, though I don't know this for certain), followed by Reva's Lightsaber (so Star Wars is 1/3 on successful Haslabs). The Engine of Vengeance and Age of Annihilation both directly followed Reva's Lightsaber.

[GamerDad74]

Originally Posted by caps

Don't all HasLabs have free shipping? I think that just boils down to limitations of the platform. As far as I know HeroQuest was the only offering they've ever done with multiple tiers, and they've never done an offering with add-ons. I don't think they even have the technical website infrastructure in place to support that.

The irony is that the Hasbros told us before the campaigned launched to "look at HeroQuest" as to how we could expect AoA to look . . . and then they did exactly the opposite of the HeroQuest campaign, other than hosting it on Haslab. Dumb.

[Heirloom]

FYI - I started an “AoA:Vanguard Campaign Postmortem” thread in the forum alongside this one.

[Hogg]

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