SUGauthor wrote:This is ridiculous, no one on the backer list would care about them handing personal information to him, that's essentially what we were doing when we backed the project to begin with. I'm not sure what they're thinking.
Sessine wrote:Thunt's next communication with Kickstarter should be a lawyer's letter. I suspect a lawyer would advise focusing on two key points:
1. Kickstarter's own privacy policy says:
"We do reserve the right to disclose personal information when we believe that doing so is reasonably necessary to comply with the law or law enforcement, to prevent fraud or abuse, or to protect KickstarterÔÇÖs legal rights."
2. As Thunt said in his first update about this:
"As of now, Evertide is no longer involved with the Kickstarter or G:AR and IÔÇÖm taking on all efforts and responsibilities. Also, last week marked the contractual deadline for the release of the game. Which means that every aspect of G:AR, even the parts designed and created by Evertide, became legally mine." (The lawyer's letter would, of course, quote from actual contract language.)
They can legally release the list. Their lawyers are just worried that they'd be stepping into the middle of something if they did. What a properly worded lawyer's letter from Tarol can do is convince them that they are already in the middle of something, and the least-risk course for them is to release the list.
I hope Thunt is somehow able to get the list because his heart is certainly in the right place... but I would honestly be a little surprised if KS turned it over to him. Even with the inclusion of language from his contract with Evertide, I suspect they would be very hesitant to turn over detailed personal information about 2,272 people.
Think about it from their perspective. If just one person is pissed about them giving Thunt the info and decides to take action by either suing or going to the media, then they have a problem. With over 2,000 backers there is a decent chance that at least one person might have a problem with them giving out that info. If even 1% of the backers have a problem with that, you have 22.7 people (the extra .7 is someone who had a run in with Kore) who could be upset. To them it's really not worth taking that risk. They've already made their money on the transactions, so their primary concern is just protecting themselves legally, not making sure backers actually receive what they pledged for.
Also remember that not everyone who backed is likely to be a devoted Goblins fan. To be sure, most of them will be, but there will also be some people who backed the game because they thought it looked cool, and others will be more casual readers. There may be a fair number of backers who like the comic but don't know much about Thunt and would be uncomfortable with Kickstarter giving Thunt their email address, mailing address, and how much they pledged.
If this were any other project, would you really be comfortable with Kickstarter just handing your personal information over to someone other than the person who created the project? Honestly, if I didn't know Thunt as well as I do, or if I happened to be a casual reader who just knew who he was and not much more, I think I would be uneasy about Kickstarter just giving him my info. I mean I'm already a little uneasy about how companies use and share my data for commercial purposes ( and in this age of data breaches we're all going to get our identities stolen anyways), but the idea of a company willingly give my information to someone other than the person I gave money to is very concerning to me. To be clear, in this case I'd be completely fine with them sending Thunt my info... but my point is that others may not be. Not saying the way KS is doing things isn't frustrating... but the reasons behind it make a certain kind of sense, and it may even be the right thing to do.
Setting aside the potential privacy issues, I am really looking forward to this game becoming a reality. I just hope Thunt is very cautious about how he proceeds. I worry about what might happen if he actually assumed legal responsibility for the project (which I know he hasn't talked about doing... but still) or if people decide to go after him because the rights for the game defaulted to him.
I really don't want to see him kill himself financially to make things right. For me, I think it would be more than enough if he sent us digital copies of the game for us to print at home. If he really wanted to go overboard he could set up something through a print on demand service where we could pay to have them printed. He absolutely should not try to print them all himself and ship them out himself out of pocket, there's just no way he could afford to in the game's current form. I was curious... so of course I tried to ballpark it:
► Show Spoiler
So I did some calculations on how much it would cost to produce and ship the game in a barebones form. There were at least 2,120 people who backed for a copy of the game itself.
The game as described in the rules in the wiki includes 407 cards, the equivalent of about 7.25 decks of cards. The thing people often forget about cards is that they are surprisingly heavy in larger volumes (something I discovered when I started collecting decks of playing cards). Fun fact, 12 decks of cards are referred to as a brick because together they are about the size and weight of a brick. In this case, if the game solely consisted of the 407 cards it would weigh about 1.5lbs.
If Thunt decides to ship it himself from Canada it would cost $16 for each game shipped to anywhere in the US. Lets guesstimate that 3/4 of the backers are in the US (no idea if this is anywhere close), if that is true it would cost $27,315 ($36,420 if we assume 100% US backers) to send out the US shipments. It is slightly better if he chooses a fulfillment center in the US to send them out for him... but not really by much. I have no idea what the processing fees for fulfillment would be I remembered 1 fulfillment company I know about, they charge $3/package domestic, so about $6,300 to process all of them. Shipping within the US could cost anywhere from $6-$10/game, which translates to anywhere from $12,700 to $21,200 (although there might be a discounted bulk rate that could bring this down a little. Either way, we're looking at bare minimum $18,000 just for shipping the cards.
Which brings us to the cards themselves. I found one site that specializes in making these games and it came to about $24-$36/game for the cards alone, and more like $38-$56 if you added in other components. So bare minimum $50,000 to make the cards in bulk, >$75,000 to include other components. They don't offer much of a discount though, so I looked things up on a custom playing cards site too. There I was able to get better deals figured out for the cards. If we went with regular card stock it would be at best $40,250 for 2,500 games (which is cheaper than 2,120 due to bulk discount rates). If we reduced the quality of the cards to their cheapest offering we could drop the price further to about $30,000.
All of that is just for printing and shipping the cards. As soon as you start adding in other components, the box, etc... the weight and price start to creep up. Add in the Shield of Wonder expansion for the 1,500 backers who asked for it and you might well end up in the next weight class for shipping. Not only would you tack on $8,000-$10,000 for printing the cards for the SoW add-on, but you might also increase the shipping cost by $4,000-$6,000.
I'm hoping that Thunt has a brilliant plan to make the game simpler and cheaper and that he finds a way to ship it out to everyone. But honestly, after figuring out just how much it would cost, I'm worried for him. The boulder around Richard's neck is just too heavy to lift.
I had a point I was going to make before I started to come up with a
"quick" estimate of the price... but now I can't remember it... ah well.
Oh, Thunt please be careful.
(Also hi guys, it's been far too long since I've had the time to post, I've missed you all... except WearsHats and Krulle... and maybe Sessine... you know I've never been crazy about that liesmith fellow either, he's just too shifty
but other than them I haven't been actively avoiding all of you. I've just been watching intently
)