An urban tile laying game for 1-5 players from the designer of Villagers.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
We're Doing a Stretch Goal!
over 3 years ago
– Thu, Sep 03, 2020 at 02:53:01 AM
Hello people!
What a first day we've had! Haakon & I were very unsure how this campaign was going to go - difficult second album & all that - but you have surpassed our expectations by miles. Streets has raised over £100,000 in its first 24 hours - a milestone that took Villagers 10 days to reach. We are flabbergasted!
In his reply to a comment, Haakon mentioned that you guys are making his dream of being a game designer come true. And it is absolutely true, Villagers allowed him to become a full-time game designer, and it looks like Streets will let him continue. Brings a tear to your eye, it does!
The same applies to me, Sinister Fish Games is now my entire livelihood, it feeds my family, and I'm ridiculously grateful for it. I do suffer from 'impostor syndrome' quite a bit, but I just act like I know what I'm doing and hope no-one notices. Sometimes I do feel like a real publisher though, usually when I work on more than one game in a day. Three is my record so far!
But let's take today as an example: here I am writing an update on a live Kickstarter campaign, and as I'm doing that, the artist Miguel Coimbra (Small World, 7 Wonders) emails me with the latest instalment of finished art for an upcoming game, and I have to stop and send him my remarks on it. If this keeps happening, I will have to think about hiring someone else, so maybe that's what Streets will represent for Sinister Fish. I hear people complaining about publishers just using Kickstarter as a glorified pre-order system, but I can assure you that I'm using it to build a business that can eventually exist independently of it.
Mr Coimbra's artwork is awesome, if you were curious. The guy is really good at monsters.
But that's all by-the-by. WHAT ABOUT THAT STRETCH GOAL???
About That Stretch Goal
It strikes me that stretch goals based on funding levels are a bit annoying for people who don't live in the same country as the creator, so we'll do it based on backer numbers instead. Easier for everyone I reckon. So here goes...
The Promo Pack will be included for every Streets backer, and the plan is to pack it inside the game box to simplify shipping - a tactic which helped us out immensely on Villagers. Remember this when your game arrives and there's only one box and you send Carly an angry email without opening it first ;)
That's all for now.
Love you all to pieces,
Dave
Welcome to the Stree... WE'RE FUNDED ALREADY?!?!
over 3 years ago
– Wed, Sep 02, 2020 at 03:56:13 AM
I had trouble figuring out what the collective term for backers should be for this campaign. On Villagers it was very simple: villagers! But for Streets? I can think of a couple of inappropriate ones, but I'm going with people, because that's what we call those cute little meeples in Streets, and I assume most of you guys are indeed people, or close to it. So people it is!
Hello people :)
Not that I was counting, but Streets reached its funding goal in 71 minutes. My mind is blown. I didn't even have chance to get through my post-launch checklist. I barely had time to finish my lunch if I'm honest. Now that it's firmly post-launch and post-lunch, it's starting to sink in: we have absolutely smashed our funding goal, and we're at 246% funded as I write.
Thank you all SO MUCH!
Haakon, Carly and I would like to extend our absolutely heartfelt gratitude to all our returning backers, and of course to everyone joining us for the first time. As always, we'll do our best to keep everything running smoothly, and in the inevitable event of something going slightly awry, we'll keep you all in the loop.
Stretch Goals!
As we explain on the campaign page, we're taking a slightly different approach to stretch goals on this campaign. For those new to Kickstarter, a "stretch goal" is some kind of free bonus item or upgrade that gets added to a project when it hits an arbitrary funding level decided by the creator - for example, "If we reach £1,000,000 everyone gets a free hog". I mean, not that, but that sort of thing.
I'm probably going to get incredibly long-winded about this, so before I do, the takeaway is that we're doing a mix of timed reveals and traditional stretch goals, which we'll start showing tomorrow, Wednesday 2nd.
Now go, run, be free, live your life, and we'll talk again soon.
This Bit is Basically Just Me Rambling
OK, still here? Not bored yet? You will be ;)
I want to talk a bit more about our stretch goal approach. See, there are stretch goals, and there are stretch goals. Let's be honest, is anyone actually excited about linen finish cards? They're fine, but they don't exactly get your pulse racing, and (trade secret) they cost next-to-nothing on top of the cost of regular cards. So for upgrades of that type, where we're just adding unnecessary but nice-to-have upgrades to existing stuff, we're going to reveal them every few days and not worry about the funding level. We'll drip-feed these timed reveals over the rest of the campaign, every few days.
But what about true stretch goals? More tiles, more cards, more plastic miniatures, free hogs? Stretch goals exist because of economy of scale in manufacturing. The more games we print, the cheaper they are individually. So on a successful campaign where we need to print more than the minimum order quantity, we get them at a cheaper unit price. Our option is then to either pocket the difference, or use it to add more stuff to the box. Most creators on Kickstarter choose the latter, but can create a problem with reprints at lower order quantities where I barely broke even when my distributor wanted 1500 copies and I originally based the retail price on 20,000 much cheaper copies. The choice at that point is to not make any money on lower volume retail sales, or increase the retail price. I heard about this from, uhh, a friend. You don't know them, they're from Canada.
So if we want the Streets standard edition - the one that will end up in stores - to exist at a sensible retail price, we need it to have a predictable manufacturing cost in line with the retail price we feel is most appropriate for it. Yes, we could fill our breezy 30-60 minute tile laying game with 200 tiles and gold plated meeples, order 20,000 copies for our legions of Kickstarter backers and get a great deal on gold, but 6 months later when our distributor wants a short print run to send to stores, we're in trouble.
The answer to this dilemma, I think, is the one we tried on Villagers: instead of adding stretch goals to the base game, we give away a separate box of free stretch goal stuff to Kickstarter backers. This offers a number of advantages in one neat package:
1) It offers an incentive and a thankyou for people who lay down their money on a game that they might not see for a year.
2) We can keep the manufacturing price (and by extension the retail price) of the base game under control so that it's possible to do smaller print runs of the game in future, without it being a cut down or lower quality version.
3) We can sell the stretch goal box on our website at a reasonable price to people who discover the game after Kickstarter but would be annoyed at missing the expanded content.
Anyway, I hope that makes some sort of sense and explains why we're doing things this way.
Dave & Haakon on TV!
I watch YouTube on my TV so it totally counts. This is Haakon & I chatting about Streets with some nice men who were not prepared for Haakon's filthy toilet-based Kevin Costner innuendos. I, for one, distance myself from his remarks.
Goodbye!
You'll get tired of me saying thankyou, but what else can I do? You guys might think you're just backing a game, but you're actually making mine & Haakon's entire year. So thankyou.
