Kickstarter & Licensed Intellectual Property

Mantic Games is getting ready to kickstart a new miniatures board game: Mars Attacks.

And doing so, they may well herald a new chapter in the miniature wargaming industry, or at least the Kickstarter-driven side of it. Mantic is now combining two ends of the wargaming industry I would’ve thought were polar opposites: Crowd-funded games and games based on Intellectual Property licensed as a franchise from somebody else.

Admittedly, some companies, such as Mongoose and their 2000AD-based Kickstarters, did it before. Mantic are not the first to do this. Mantic’s Kickstarters tend to have a bigger footprint though, being one of the few miniature gaming companies that broke the Million-Dollar Barrier.

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#1 – The Evolution of “What Is Kickstarter”?

Few things have been as disruptive to the niche industry of miniature wargaming (and even more so board games) than the success of crowd-funding, most famously www.kickstarter.com.

As quickly as “kickstarter” appeared on the scene, as rapidly has it morphed and changed as different people and companies have used crowd-funding platforms in new and different ways.

I tried my hand at a few opinion pieces to capture some of the controversies, notably:

• Kickstarter is Entertainment
• I Pledge Money on Kickstarter Because…
• Do Big Kickstarters Hurt Small Kickstarters?

But I digress…

Let’s look at the “Evolution of Kickstarter” as it is often perceived (rightly or wrongly) by the (board- and wargaming) public.

Step 1 – The Visionary Entrepreneur(s)

This – arguably – is the “ideal” people think of when they think Kickstarter & Co. A lone guy/girl, or group of friends, with a cool idea, but no funds, no publicity, no means of “getting started”.

Even if banks and other investors turned them down, they can pitch their vision on Kickstarter. If the public – “the crowd” – is convinced by what they see, they will fund “the idea”.

I doubt there ever was a time when only these “pure” entrepreneurs existed on Kickstarter.com, but they are still out there and – all things considered – have a much easier time getting start-up funds today, thanks to Kickstarter, than their peers did 10 or 20 years ago.

Step 2 – The Serial-Kickstarters

Kickstarter-campaigns worked out very well for many people. It is no surprise than, that some people and companies came back for seconds, and for thirds, and even specialized in running the show over and over again, for themselves and even for others.

It spawned lots of controversy (and does to this day). The idea of a “professional Kickstarter” was (is?) perceived as an oxymoron by people (including Kickstarter staff) who like to think of the crowd-funding idea with a romantic notion of “how Kickstarter should be used”.

Step 3 – The Kickstarter Brands

As people did multiple Kickstarters and – which seems to have become a common theme – started cross-promoting other Kickstarter’s through their own Kickstarter (presumably, people who already pledged on one Kickstarter are more likely to pledge on other Kickstarters).

Even on Kickstarter, people seem to like the familiar over the utterly new, which led to a wealth of tongue-in-cheek pop-culture references and the “borrowing” of iconic figures from one Kickstarter to another, most famously Kingdom Death’s Twilight Knight.

This, in essence, is using established concepts and characters to offer (potential) customers something familiar. Still, these things mere mostly “unofficial” in a slightly anarchic way or “born” on Kickstarter (I know, the Twilight Knight existed long before the KD Kickstarter, but it certainly made it’s break-through there).

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#2 – Licensed IP Games as the Next (Final?) Step

Now… licensed IP products and franchises on Kickstarter!

Maybe I am totally off track, but to me it feels that any successful agreement with some other company to work with an established IP, is pretty much the near-ultimate sign of a company that has matured. It’s the kind of things you see from Fantasy Flight or Games Workshop, not from (even the larger, more ambitious) start-up companies in miniature gaming.

To secure an agreement to work on somebody elses IP (that is worth anything), one presumably has to show:

• A track-record of providing quality product, so the owner of whatever IP you’re licensing will know his stuff isn’t tarnished by an inferiour product.
• Proven business-chops, so both IP licensor and licensee will know there’ll (most likely) be enough profits to go round for both sides of the contract.
• Often enough, an obligation to bring X amount of product to the market, or else lose the license to the same IP.

Most of all, the risk for dragging around a franchise performing less-well-than-expected seems to lie fairly often with the licensee. The plug was pulled on Warhammer Online only after contracts had run their time. GW is hanging on to the Hobbit, even though it clearly isn’t living up to expectations.

Perhaps there are Kickstarter-success-conditional franchise-contracts these days, but in their basic form, a licensed IP-based product is nearly polar opposite of a crowd-funded one.

With the latter, you launch a product, if enough support materialized through the crowd-funding campaign. With the former, you may – if things go South – be required to keep making a product, even post-launch, despite a proven lack of interest from the crowd.

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#3 – What Do You Think?

What do you think?

Personally, I’d really love to see – side by side – the pitch for the same product; to the licensor of a valuable IP on one hand, and to the Kickstarter-public one the other.

Or is passing along some risk of running a licensed product to crowd-funding mechanisms the logical consequence, precisely because under-performing franchises can be a money sink?

What would happen, in theory, if the Kickstarter-drive for a franchise game doesn’t fund? Would the franchise contract default? Would the licensee be doubly screwed, possibly ending up with an obligation to produce a game despite Kickstarter-failure? And pay royalties for it too?

And does a familiar IP to Kickstarter help getting funded, and fund higher than the “Kickstarter-competition”, similar to how pop-culture references made – for example – Zombicide 2 a USD 2+ million success, because even on Kickstarter people are drawn to things they “know”?

The combination of Kickstarter-funding and licensed IPs certainly throws up some fascinating questions. Let me know what you think!

Z.