Crowd Funding - Pitfalls of Miniatures Projects

I’ve been a user of Kickstarter for more than a year now and I’ve even posted on this blog about projects that I’ve found interesting. Despite this I’ve not backed too many projects and have found myself looking less and less for new projects to back, why is that?

First of all like many people, I suspect, I initially see a project and am wowed by the sales pitch. However I usually like to take time to reflect on the project before backing it and it’s usually during this reflection time that I find myself decide not to back.

Now while I appreciate that the idea behind crowd funding was to get small projects off the ground, with miniatures this isn’t always a good thing due to the complex nature of designing and manufacturing them (this article touches on this in much detail). Likewise the platform is also used by larger companies as a pre-order tool, effectively selling you products in large quantities that you’ll be able to buy retail a year later at pretty much the same price.

So ideally you want to find something in-between the two, a small scale project, offering something special, by a company who know what they’re doing. And sadly I’ve not felt that many projects meet those criteria.

At the end of the day I look at it this way.

• Is project owner clear on what they are offering? For me I want to see prototype models as a minimum. A few renders do not mean completed or even feasible miniatures.

• Is it giving me anything extra for backing early? If not they maybe I should wait.*

• Can I wait? If so, then I wait, this gives me the benefit of buying the products retail when the product has to be more clearly defined.

• Can I afford to lose this money? If not, then I probably shouldn’t back it.

*(In the case of the few genuine small start-ups it doesn’t need to be a lot if it’s the difference between the project happening or not).

Touching on the last point, can I afford to lose my money, I’m reminded of a recent well publisiced Kickstarter that appears to have failed. The Torn Armor project has ended up with accusations and counter accusations (see here) and looks like it's heading towards the inevitable end involving the loss of backer’s money.

I’ll let you come to your own conclusions about how this project failed and ask, would you have backed this project?