Flawed Empires

BLACK PLAGUE, GREEN HORDE It all really started for CMON with Zombicide . Not the original game, but the next one, Black Plague . The December 2015 Kickstarter. It raked in just over US$4M with almost 21,000 backers. A base pledge of US$100 provided a Core Box with 71 miniatures and a Hero Box that added another 5. The Wulfsburg expansion added a further US$50 to the pledge but provided 26 more models… plus an exclusive model. It is unclear what benefit was gained for the US$10 second ‘expansion’. Day 1 of the Kickstarter Campaign for Black Plague was astonishing. It had a funding target of US$125K but reached US$710K in just the first three hours! At the conclusion of the first day it managed to secure US$1,080K. Over eight-and-a-half times the original funding target. However, in order to reach this total, CMON had given away 43 additional miniatures as Stretch Goals (SG). These were free content provided to backers as an incentive to pledge funds to the project. Pe...

NOT QUITE DEAD CMON. The potential answer to the question about who will move into the market vacuum as Games Workshop (GW) gradually, but inevitably, vanishes into the abyss. We have watched GW abuse, violate, alienate, exile, and basically shit all over its market for decades. It literally relied upon regeneration to make massive profits by charging outrageous prices for product worth a tiny fraction of that, and responded to criticism with casual disregard as one generation left and the next moved into its place. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cmon/zombicide-black-plague Despite the many, many ‘stories’ from former customers and staff, it’s incredibly difficult to find any of it posted on the internet. GW itself ruthlessly purges negative feedback on its own sites, and where they find sites even mentioning their products, threatens legal action to silence the authors and, in some cases, literally steals ideas under the claim those ideas contain GW ‘intellectual p...

…BECAUSE IT WORKS ITS WAY INTO THE SOUL Over the last few months, GW released an old favourite. It was a game from 1996 called Necromunda . A popular skirmish table-top game based on their Warhammer 40,000 setting, 2nd Edition, before all the big-ticket, cash grab and piss-poor rules changes that screwed the game for everyone. The appeal of that version of the hobby was small ‘squad’ sizes. It provided greater accessibility for players whose funds were limited. It got canned for that very reason. GW likes its sales to be big. A lot of cash in a single sale. The mindset of the greedy is fairly predictable. They ditched the small sales because the cost-profit ratio appeared small. But what smarter companies realise is that a lot of small sales provides a lot of return. It caters to a broader market base. Price them out of the market and suddenly you find your profits shrink too, the smaller market base only purchasing a limited number of big ticket items. Whoops. So alon...