Does your paycheck impact your spending habits? This is a question I posed to researcher Jun Yang a few months ago. Jun and her coauthors have been studying millions of data points from Kickstarter as they prepare a paper focusing on some statistical anomalies. Jun works at Indiana University, but she’s visiting Washington University in […]
Last month I wrote about how much I like Starbuck’s reward system, and I proposed a Kickstarter stretch-goal method inspired by it. If any creators wanted to try it, I asked them to share their experiences with me so I could share them with you. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait very long, as Carlos […]
While it may not always seem to be the case, I prefer to sell the majority of our games to distributors. Quite simply, it is much easier to sell and ship a pallet of games to a single location than to sell and ship 126 games to 126 individual customers. I’m still glad we have […]
Largely thanks to notes from an array of astute readers, I’ve accumulated a batch of links and observations that are best shared in potpourri format. They’re noted below in no particular order. Are Kickstarted Games Less Likely to Get to the Table? On a recent episode of the Five Games for Doomsday podcast, we talked […]
I continue to revisit the Kickstarter Lesson posts I’ve written over the last 7 years in numerical order, highlighting the core elements of each. Stretch Goals (#11): Most successful Kickstarters include stretch goals for a couple reasons, (a) they encourage backers to pledge more and (b) they encourage backers to share your project with […]
Let’s say that you have a product; in this example, we’ll say it’s a board game. You’ve worked on it for a few years, and while you’d prefer for someone else to publish it–you love designing games, but you don’t want to start and run a game company–you want to demonstrate to a publisher that […]
Way back in 2011, I sat down at my desk with a vision that had been forming over the last few months: I wanted to design a game and try to launch it on Kickstarter. This is the point when many entrepreneurs compose their business plan. But I’m glad I didn’t, because I had no […]
For several weeks now, wildfires have ravaged certain parts of Australia. The most recent report I’ve seen is that 15.4 million acres have burned, 1400 homes have been destroyed, and an estimated 1 billion animals have been killed. At Stonemaier Games, we typically don’t reveal information about new products until we’ve already made them and […]
Return to Dark Tower by Restoration Games is, in my opinion, a nearly perfect Kickstarter project. It’s not just that the project is doing well–it’s exceeded $2 million after 2 days–nor is it just that it gets so many of the fundamentals right. It’s also that Return to Dark tower refines, innovates, and implements a […]
A few months ago, my girlfriend and I bought a condo. It’s been a long time since I’ve gone through the home-buying process, but fortunately we had an attentive, helpful realtor (Paul at Allen Brake). Ever since we moved in, Paul has stayed in touch with us in non-intrusive ways: He sent us personalized notes […]
