Dreams dashed - kickstarter woes.

For years now I've been working on and off as a miniature painter. It might sound like a cool job, but really it's a lot of work for very little pay. More often than not I find myself working for less that a £1.00 and hour and I wouldn't be able to survive if it wasn't for state benefits.

For the longest time I've always known that the real money in miniatures comes from making them, not painting them. So I decided to follow that goal, grabbed my tools and putty and got to work. I'm a big fan of the Cthulhu mythos and it's struck me that there is a very limited range of miniatures based on it available. Really, there are only the old Reaper minis, which have been around for decades now and aren't very appealing. Apart from those, you get the occasional original sculpt that might get a few dozen castings, but that's about it. I thought I was on to a winner, so the last few weeks I've spent day and night creating alien monstrosities from beyond the stars in 30mm.

The question of how I was going to fund casting and packaging was in my mind as I worked, but I thought that perhaps Kickstarter might come in handy with that. I went over and did a search for Cthulhu stuff, glancing over the search results. The search reveals a bunch of stuff: a boardgame; cthulhu themed wrapping paper; stickers, a book, a figurine. No minis however. This just gets better and better!

The weeks went by and I got a bunch of stuff nearing completion. I started to think about how exactly I was going to do the kickstarter stuff and so I head back to the site and open the page for the boardgame to see how they did theirs.

I literally felt my blood run cold.

This boardgame was a miniature based game, with a full range of minis; minis that looked better than mine. And do you know how much money they got from the kickstarter? 1.5 million!!! And here's the real kicker (no pun), they aren't a new business. They're a long time, vetted company with hit board and computer games going back decades. Civilization, Arkham Horror, Quake, Age of Empires, the list goes on and on. Hell the guy is so well known that his name is included in the games title. And they have the balls to say on their page that they are a just three guys working out of a garage. Must be one hell of a garage considering THEY ARE ****ING MILLIONAIRES!!! They've got a PR department promoting their product on every geeky website on the web, they've got concept artists and booths at conventions. They can offer published books of concept art as incentive while all I can do is offer novelty minis wearing top hats. Basically these guys have got it made! So why the hell are they on kickstarter? Surely the site is for people such as myself who need, well... a kickstart. And now here I am, trying to pick up the leavings of the fat cats, but not really standing much chance of any real success because these greedy assholes need to take a bite of every pie.

I am sorry to hear that. Kickstarter actually really isn't that great of a place due to the percentage they take from you, and how companies (who as you said HAVE the money to fund their own projects) get far more promoted then self started companies, completely ruining the purpose of the website anyway.

A website I would suggest you try is indiegogo. Far better for true small businesses that need help getting started. They take less from you, and it's easier to connect it to social media. And, if you don't reach your goal, you KEEP your funds from what I remember.

I too was considering Kickstarter. Then I saw that Spike Lee used it to raise money and realized it's just a con for big companies to get free money.

I went and checked out indiegogo. One other campaign to make Cthulhu miniatures exists there. Funnily enough it is by Reaper Miniatures (another established company *sigh). They seem to have realized that their miniature range sucks and are running the campaign to update certain figures. They got 17K to create a small handful along with a couple of new sculpts.

I like how in their presentation they say it takes an "astronomical" amount of time and money to sculpt and cast a figure and that is why they are running the campaign. Really? Takes me a couple of days to make a miniature and £50-100 to make the mold. The cost of casting is taken into account for the retail price. What I need is money to hire a web designer and create an online store, purchase packaging, commission an artist for the box art, etc - all things that Reaper already has sorted out. So what's the money they are asking for again? Nothing. Just milking the public and able to do so because of brand recognition.

I think I'm going to go ahead and make a go of my line anyway. I wonder whether Reaper will get pissy and throw a cease-and-desist order at me? I would hope not considering that when they first started out (before they bought the rights to 'Call of Cthulhu') they had to call their Cthulhu model an "Elderich Demon" to keep the law off their backs. Besides there are plenty of other sculpters who have done limited releases of Cthulhu miniatures and seem to be doing alright.

Also I apologize if I'm sounding angry and frustrated here. It's because I am. I feel a bit like I'm going up against the man here: no room for newcomers; a monopolized market; big wigs getting richer while the poor get nothing. What a horrible economic trap commercialism is.

I registered specifically to answer this forum post.

On KS, I see two tiers of projects. The one you saw was Cthulhu Wars, an industry project with experienced game industry veterans. Sandy Petersen designed the Call of Cthulhu RPG, the DOOM video game, and teaches a course in game design. Not too surprisingly, he has the various contacts and infrastructure to produce a professional looking boardgame.

However, as a single-person operation, you're not competing against them, any more than a mom-and-pop store competes against some big chain. Many one-man miniature companies are funding on KS, and are certainly not as large as the high-profile boardgame companies.

Impact Miniatures, for example, has run multiple miniatures and dice projects on KS. I would argue that KS has *enabled* them to help run their business. They also have a web site selling their miniatures, meaning that they have some small business experience prior to KS. KS does *NOT* teach you how to run a business, so you should have some experience before running a KS project. One of their early projects funded 4K, but a later one funded 100K.

RAFM Miniatures has been making miniatures for over 30 years. On IndieGoGo, they ran their first crowdfunding campaign for 17K. On KS, they're currently at twice that.

However, I don't think your goal is to run a KS project. Your goal is to make a living off of your sculpting abilities. If you're dreams are "dashed" because of a single KS project, I'm not sure if you have the tenacity to start your own business. But, thanks to KS, miniature sculptors are higher in demand, so I highly recommend you sculpt some figures of *different genres* and submit photos of them to different miniature companies.

Good luck!

Too ****ing right. Totally agree.

{ Kein Teufel }
Translation: Not a devil
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