I’m struggling to fully understand something, and I’d love to hear your perspective.

It’s actually two different sides to the same coin:

1. Is there something inherently magical about crowdfunding for consumers that cannot be captured by a newly revealed, ready-to-ship product?
2. If there is a sacrifice in attracting early-adopter consumers via the ready-to-ship model, is it vastly outweighed by the positive impact on retail customers (the vast majority of our sales)?

Since 2018, our model at Stonemaier Games has been that we invest our time, creativity, and resources into designing, developing, fine-tuning, producing, and freight-shipping new products before we reveal them–along with reviews and playthroughs of the 100% final version–and then we finally ask customers to consider buying them. We then ship to customers (consumers and retailers) over the weeks following the launch, and soon after there is a retail release.

This is done entirely in service to both consumers and retailers. By having such a short gap between reveal, launch, shipping, and release, we cast a strong spotlight on our new products, which increases the chances that the excitement from the reveal will sustain through the retail release and beyond. Customers aren’t left speculating on incomplete games with uncertain timelines (even as an avid backer myself, by the time I receive most crowdfunded games, I can’t remember why I was excited about them in the first place).

I’ve run crowdfunding campaigns (my last was Scythe in 2015), and I admire how creators and platforms have evolved over the years. I learn from them every day. But I have zero interest in returning to crowdfunding, as I truly believe our method better serves customers. We don’t need crowdfunding to build and engage community, gauge demand, improve our products, raise awareness, and allocate quantities to region-friendly fulfillment centers.

However, despite all those pros for ready-to-ship launches, I can’t ignore the data: Many crowdfunded games of a similar weight, aesthetic appeal, polish, quality, price, and region-friendly fulfillment–even from less-established publishers with a much smaller reach than Stonemaier Games–have attracted more early-adopter customers than our launches. Why is that? And does it highlight a problem or an asset?

Here are a few data points from our ready-to-ship new games sold over the last year:

• Braided Skies recently earned around $200,000 from around 4,000 customers.
• Wingspan Pocket earned around $255,000 from around 16,300 customers.
• Duel of Meloch earned around $250,000 from around 7,100 customers.
• Origin Story raised around $92,000 from around 4,200 customers.

Those are perfectly fine numbers, and I’m happy as long as our games bring joy to those who buy them. But relative to our overall reach–55,000 newsletter subscribers, 59,000 YouTube subscribers, a combined 100,000+ followers on Facebook and Instagram, and even 15,000 Champions who get a discount on all webstore purchases–it’s fair to say that quite a few potential early-adopters are missing out on our launches.

What elements of successful crowdfunding campaigns are missing from our ready-to-ship launches?

• focus: My favorite crowdfunding campaigns are those where there are 1 or 2 core products at most, plus a few related add-on options. Conversely, for many recent Stonemaier launches, we often offer a bunch of new accessories and expansions (most unrelated to the core product) that happen to be ready at the same time. We do this so people can consolidate shipping and reach free-shipping thresholds, but I think there’s value in a more focused approach.
• super-deluxe versions: Crowdfunding campaigns seem to be thriving on deluxe and super-deluxe versions of games. Our approach is to try to offer a deluxified experience in the standard version of each game, though we’ve never made a super-deluxe version of any game (at least not by modern standards).
• duration: Our launches are 5 days; crowdfunding campaigns average around 25 days. Why so short for us? I view it as a concentrated spotlight during that time, after which we’re typically ready to start shipping to customers. The products remain available on our webstore after the launch, just without the launch discounts. We typically see around 80% of consumer launch orders on the first day. That said, from the day of the reveal through the end of the campaign, we’re looking at 3-4 weeks–the same length as a crowdfunding campaign.
• visibility of funding and backer totals: There’s undeniable power in the visibility of funding and backer totals on crowdfunding platforms. If I check out an active campaign and see that it’s raised $500,000 from 6,500 backers, I have increased confidence and curiosity. We display launch units sold on each Stonemaier webstore product page, but it’s so spread out and you may not even see it.
• sense of urgency: Even crowdfunding campaigns that don’t use FOMO tactics (I have zero interest in using fear as a motivator) still have a sense of urgency to them, as there’s a good chance the game might be difficult to find for a while after the campaign delivers to backers. Aside from a small launch discount and a desire to be the first to play a new game, there’s almost no urgency to our launches. If you don’t buy from us now, you can easily buy from a retailer in about a month, and if the product sells out, we’ll make more.
• platform-driven discovery: I’ve always been a little dubious about the numbers reported by crowdfunding platforms for platform-driven discovery. However, there’s definitely a difference between hubs for a wide variety of projects compared a publisher-specific webstore in how people are more likely to browse and stumble across products they weren’t aware of.

Do you think a few of those elements add to the “magic” of crowdfunding? Of course, there’s also the aspect of helping to create something that doesn’t exist yet, but I still believe we can best serve our customers by making the product before asking customers to pay for it.

As much as I want people to get excited about our games from the start, our commitment to the ready-to-ship method seems to yield great results for our retail customers and localization partners, which is great! Here’s the data: If I add up the consumer webstore launch sales of new games since the beginning of 2024 (starting with our most recent retail releases, Wingspan Pocket and Duel of Meloch, and going back to Wyrmspan), the total is 72,462 units. Compare that to the total units in print for those games: 1,320,000 units.

That’s right: Over time, only 5% of our games are sold to consumers during the 5-day launch period. Close to 95% of our new games are sold by retailers and localization partners (plus some via our consumer webstore on an ongoing basis).

So it seems to me that in de-emphasizing the launch itself and offering a tight gap between reveal and release, we vastly increase the long-tail of our games. I think this is a worthy sacrifice, though I would still like to add a little more crowdfunding magic to our ready-to-ship launches. What do you think?

Also read:

• Jamey Stegmaier on Crowdfunding 11 Years Later (external article by Fulfillrite)
• Are the Reasons We Quit Kickstarter Still Valid 6 Years Later?
• 10 Years Without Crowdfunding

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