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Originally Posted by Senator
Doesn't look like it will reach the goal, but to help it along, I will pledge 120.
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I really appreciate your support. Yes, it appears the game will never be made, but it was a nice experience getting something completely new ready for publication and I felt confident it was a quality product that many football fans would enjoy.
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Originally Posted by CU Tiger
Did anyone else note the thread starter...this is their only post yet they knew to come here?
hrmmm...
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I wondered about that myself. It was up very quickly after I launched the Kickstarter. And, of course, a lot of you know by now I always launch in the dead of night.
But no, it wasn't me. I don't see the value of having a second account here - for one, why shouldn't announcements come from me directly, and two, if I use it for anything else, that's something that could easily backfire quite badly.
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Originally Posted by CU Tiger
BTW, Jim on the marketing philosophy I truly appreciate your soft sell, but will add if you dont believe in it enough to think its great and will improve my life, I probably wont either.
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I feel too close to my work to tell you if it's great. If I sell something, it's because I feel confident it's a product I would enjoy myself. I stand behind what I produce. This is a huge leap for me, going from PC games to a card game. I underestimated the size of that leap.
So it took a lot of extra work to get it where I liked it. And then playtesting revealed game flaws, so I took more time to adjust the concept to a place where it still had what I bring to the genre (statistical integrity, a sense of football strategy) and what I wanted to accomplish with the game (bringing a new dynamic of game play that captures the spirit of what coordinators and coaches do) and was accessible in terms of game time and play resolution.
But to tell you it will improve your life? That's not me. I'm not marketing a cancer drug or even something simple like a bouquet of roses that will brighten your wife's day. It is what it is, and my view of how a game should be marketed is to simply provide accurate information about it. Unfortunately, I can't advertise. And my attempts to get people who could provide a meaningful boost in terms of word-of-mouth weren't all successful.
The bottom line is that I had to provide a new product that captured the market I've already established. And it only does to a limited extent.
My style is to provide clean, useful graphics that don't take up so much room that I have to sacrifice *any* utility. With the PC game, that worked quite nicely in 1998, and has for more than ten years. With a modern card game, maybe not so much. I don't think the graphics are "poor", but it's not economically feasible to hire an artist to create unique card artwork rather than my diagrams. And if someone can do that for me, to be viable, it requires enough time to do it well that I ethically should be paying for that time.
That's a long answer just to say I believe in my work. And I also believe that a good product that has complexity eventually sells itself through design, and the best long-term marketing strategy is low-key honesty. I don't do short-term well, and that's not ideal for the Kickstarter model. If it fails to fund, I have to accept the blame and figure out what is next. Certainly I appreciate your positive wishes, along with all of you who expressed that sentiment without pre-ordering.
Though I do wish there was something special I could do for those of you who would like this product and probably will never see it (reiterating, of course, that no money changes hands when a Kickstarter project doesn't receive full funding).