Late to the party...

[Jrandom]

I just found out about Realm Works, and WOW!

Is there anyway to donate to the project now that the Kickstarter has ended?

[rob]

Unfortunately, no. The next opportunity with Realm Works will be when it officially releases this summer. If you want to stay abreast of news regarding Realm Works, please sign up for our monthly company newsletter, which is accomplished via our website at www.wolflair.com.

[Jrandom]

Not that LWD doesn't have a enough on their plate, but why not develop your own donation system? Kickstarter is mainly and advertising and fufillment platform, which costs you about 20% of your donation total (from my understanding). I doubt that any non-gaming Kickstarter fans donated to Realm Works. LWD has the technical skills necessary to do the back end. Finally, you could amortize the cost of a proprietary donation system across any future donation drives.

As a gamer and as someone who has used Armybuilder for a long time, I would prefer to see LWD get 100% of my donations.

[mirtos]

Technically, I think kickstarter takes 5%. Amazon takes 5%. If LWD were to do a lot of drives, it might make sense, but probably not. almost any fufillment platform is going to take money, so the real question isn't was it gamers using the kickstarter site.


The question is:

1. Did the kickstarter provide LWD enough donations that they wouldnt have gotten on their own? AND

2. Is the cost of kickstarter worth it? AND

3. How many people would have donated to LWD without a well known entity like Kickstarter/Amazon behind them?

[Jrandom]

Looks like you are correct. This is from the Kickstarter FAQ:

What are the fees?
If a project is successfully funded, Kickstarter applies a 5% fee to the funds collected.

In the US, pledges will be processed by Amazon Payments, while in the UK, pledges will be processed securely through a third-party payments processor.*These payment processing fees work out to roughly 3-5%.

So, that is about $17k that went outside of LWD ($170k is a pretty successful donation drive, plus it was done in 1 month. Bravo!)

So 1836 people donated a sloppy average of $90 each. That is a pretty high average donation rate. How many of those people wouldn't of donated without the Kickstarter label? I would say a far amount. I was going to donate for the first time via Kickstarter, when I saw Realm Works, only to find out it had expired.

[mirtos]

Looks like you are correct. This is from the Kickstarter FAQ:

What are the fees?
If a project is successfully funded, Kickstarter applies a 5% fee to the funds collected.

In the US, pledges will be processed by Amazon Payments, while in the UK, pledges will be processed securely through a third-party payments processor.*These payment processing fees work out to roughly 3-5%.

So, that is about $17k that went outside of LWD ($170k is a pretty successful donation drive, plus it was done in 1 month. Bravo!)

So 1836 people donated a sloppy average of $90 each. That is a pretty high average donation rate. How many of those people wouldn't of donated without the Kickstarter label? I would say a far amount. I was going to donate for the first time via Kickstarter, when I saw Realm Works, only to find out it had expired.

While you're right that 17K went outside of LWD, the number that is "in play" is more likely between 8 and 12K. Because no matter who they use, LWD would have to pay a processing fee. Even retail stores pay a processing fee. Nobody ever gets 100%. Unless they give you cash or check. 3-5% actually isnt that high. If you look at the kickstarter site it really depends where the money comes from, U.K. vs U.S) its a little higher than it should be, but its not extraordinarily high. The average processing charge is 2.3% for online businesses. I imagine a bunch of people were like you, first time donaters. I also imagine some were also other kickstarter donaters (I looked at a couple of people, and some had donated to no projects, and some were backers to tons of game projects). People familiar with LWD probably would have donated either way, but people who weren't might have given pause. They might have thought about putting in their credit card information. Going through Amazon feels (Im not saying if it is) safer to many many people. You really cannot discount the importance of feeling safe with your credit card information.

Also some people back kickstarter because they know they are only going to be charged if the project is fully funded. These type of systems can be complicated. Lets say it wasn't succesful. Lets say they had earned 55K instead of the 170K (I agree: congrats). What would LWD do? Would they give it back? Would they only charge at the end? What about chargebacks? How would they deal with that? All of these are things that anyone doing any type of fufillment system has to think about. Would it really be worth the extra 8-17k? maybe. or maybe theyd have to have an employee spending time dealing with that. (chances are the money they would get would be 97% of the funds, as opposed to 90-93, depending if they had more U.S. vs U.K. backers) At best, we're talking about 12K more money, perhaps less. I cant and wouldn't presume to speak for them, but considering the goal was about 2/3 of that, if the goal made was 100K, it would be more like 7,000.00, and it hardly seems worth it for that. Especially for the hassle. Again, I wouldnt presume to speak for LWD, but there is a reason so many people use organizations like Kickstarter.

[Jrandom]

I appreciate your well thought out post.

[mirtos]

I appreciate your well thought out post.

it took a couple of edits :)

[llothos]

Are you guys going to be doing pre-orders as it gets closer to release?

[Laruuk]

I am totally bummed that I didn't see this kickstarter! Will definitely be purchasing.