by topherr
abrannan wrote:
topherr wrote:
To use your analogy, it's as if you take advance payment for a promise to jump over Snake River Canyon and then your highly experienced aero/astro engineer, who's designing the rocket to do it in, quits.
Engineer or no, it's still attempting a massive jump with no prior experience, which, while gutsy, is more than likely to end badly.
Another subtle point that may be easy to miss: Going directly to a factory - rather than through Panda or another middleman or a printer in the US, Belgium or Germany - created a lot of issues to be sure. But it's also the only way that we could have even attempted to be inclusive for game fanatics that usually get ignored - in countries outside of the US. These are folks that are routinely forced to fork out $35 or $50 in shipping costs for a $30 game, if international shipping is available at all.
One way to look at it is that we cut the cost of a middleman in order to put international backers on the same footing as US backers. This was intentional. Now I completely understand why a lot of backers - particularly in the US - think that it wasn't worth it. And certainly it's been a rough haul. But if we're going to have a frank discussion about CGF's business practices, it's worth looking at the goals of the project, not just the problems (the forseeability of which is somewhat debatable).
CGF has made plenty of mistakes, to be sure, recently, and further back. And I can totally understand why folks have felt aggrieved over the years by the clip art, the clamshells, and so forth. Lots of folks find GTR I.V component quality lacking compared to Race for the Galaxy (a comparable game I personally think is a little bit better than GTR). But remember, RftG has an MSRP of $35 and GTR I.V has an MSRP $23. This may not seem like a big deal to someone making professional wages, but it is certainly significant to someone who can't routinely spend a hundred or two hundred bucks on game orders. Our new games, Quills, Pala, and Montana, continue this thinking - lots of components, jam packed in their clamshell, hours and hours of game development and playtesting by Maestro Rob Seater, and, in my frank opinion, a pretty remarkable amount of fun and challenge for $13 to $23 MSRP (ask anyone who knows me whether I'd tell you if I thought one of them sucked :devil: ). Also, they've been all been Heiko'd!
With Black Box, our goal was match the MSRP of RftG, but include higher quality components than RftG. That's what we paid for, and that's what I think we got (just feel linen on the cards, or the ribbon that helps get the cards out). It's certainly true that there have been some issues with box bubbling and jacks chipping, but please don't assume that any of this comes from us being cheap. In fact, as I wrote earlier, the more expensive stock we paid for has actually created more quality issues than the high end (but not ultra high end) card stock we were originally planning on using. Remember, silk is more delicate than cotton.
As I've said before, CGF should be rightly criticized for the mistakes we've made - and many of the criticisms about Ed are somewhat on target as well (he does make an easy target at times!). It's also fair game to opine, as many have, that the tradeoffs we've made have not been worth the costs. But they have been tradeoffs, and most of them have been made as a result of Ed's consistent dedication to try to give customers the very best value that we can. That's why we pack our games full of components and don't sell lots of dead air under a giant insert in an impressive looking box. It's why we're providing free or nearly free shipping to supporters in Brunei and Brazil and Israel. And it's why Ed is currently pushing me to find a different way to ship to Canada than USPS - a way that will be pretty cost-neutral to us, but will save Canadian backers a couple of bucks per Black Box on the receiving end. I get that a lot of Canadian backers don't care about a couple of bucks (especially given these delays). But Ed does. And he always will.
Keep the critiques coming. They will, after all, make us a better company. No question. But if we're doing a cost-benefit analysis, let's really look at both sides of the equation.