When?

When will Domains of War be released?

I asked the same thing a couple days ago and was told it will be sometime in June.

Tomorrow is “sometime in June”… :smiley: (But I think that’s being overly optimistic.)

The Complete Domains at War PDF is scheduled for release to our backers on June 6th. It will be available to the public July 4th.

The books should follow within 30 days depending on vagaries of printing.

That when leads to an inevitable new “when” question: when is the next Kickstarter kicking off?

Soon(ish)…?

Now, where’d I put that eye-rooling smiley…?

Out of curiosity, why available early for backers? I’m not questioning their right to exclusive access, since they helped make it possible, I was just wondering if there were something about the vagaries of production that make it possible to ship electronic copies to one group earlier (Like, with treemeat books, it makes sense that the first few thousand printed would be all accounted for, so the ones in stores get made later, in addition to having to funnel through stores)

Good question. Assume 2,000 people ultimately buy a particular Autarch product. As a company, we are in a considerably better position if those 2,000 people back the Kickstarter rather than buy the product after it is released. The Kickstarter enables us to pay for art, design, layout, manufacture and shipping without tying up our very scarce capital, and it helps us gauge demand and control inventory. The converse is true; a product with no backers will be hard for us to get into production at all, at least at our current level of quality (full-color cover, etc.)

Therefore we want to reward people as much as we can for participating in the Kickstarter, since they are offering up their hard-earned resources for our use.

Also I think we all end up with a product with less errors:

(1) backers are the most likely section of Autarch customers to scour the PDF as soon as it is available, and

(2) backers are more likely to feed any errors back to Autarch, who can then modify and re-release the PDF quickly:

(3) again backers are less likely to lose confidence in Autarch because of a quick re-release (especially if due to improvement from backer involvement).

(4) backers are more likely to lose confidence in Autarch due to a slow re-release, especially if backers have reported errors.

So committing to an early PDF release for backers, and if necessary a quick re-release (to send improved copy to the printer), is a good policy for Autarch.

Yay crowd funding!

All good points! Thank you for adding them. Yay!

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. A bit like a beta test.

Very much like that. Plus, the backers can go back to the product when it’s done and point out things they contributed on, which makes us feel like real-grown-up-game-designers.

My contribution even got a diagram! I ARE SPECIAL.

Well you see, we consulted the Vagaries of Production table in the back of the book…

Here at Autarch, making people feel special is JOB #1.

We love you backers!

I’m not interested in Domains, but hope it’s a big success for you. Thus, I’m glad it’s out of the way now. Looking forward to the next big thing. What will be the next kickstarter?