Talk About Timing – The Upcoming Emperor’s Hand

In fitting with the theme of this week’s post, it’s coming out a few hours late.

Why? Well, this week I want to talk to you about our schedule. First things first:

Emperor’s Hand is Coming to Kickstarter
March 9th to April 2nd

With that said, one thing might stick out – it’s a week shorter than most kickstarters. There are a number of reasons for that, and I’d like to go through them:

1) A shorter Kickstarter means less slowdown in the middle.
Our previous kickstarters have had less than 20% of their funding happen in the middle two weeks, with only ~5% or so in the middle 7 days. Missing out on that 5% isn’t great, but there’s no guarantee that we will. In fact, by having only 3 weeks the starting rush and the ending jump may run together – as some kickstarter’s have found in the past – and create more hype.

2) Running a Kickstarter is a lot of work and stress.
We already have a lot to do, and marketing etc. for a Kickstarter eat into that time, along with the stress of every day where the backing drops below the prior, and never knowing how much it’ll pick back up in the end. Dropping the middle week cuts that stress significantly – by at least 1/4, but likely closer to 1/3.

3) We want its profit in this tax year. (By April 5th)
We’ve been converting some stock into cash this year by trading at conventions, but we have made very little net profit. For various reasons we’re optimistic of much more income next tax year, and having nothing this year and all of it next is suboptimal, so we want to end this tax year.
Given that we’re not ready to launch this week, a three week Kickstarter is the longest we can fit in.

And last, but certainly not least

4) We have big things planned for later this year.
Clash of Blades, the game I’ve been working on for the last 6 years, is finally ready to launch, with no more nits to pick. But I don’t feel ready to send it out to crowdfunding right now. In all our previous kickstarters something has gone wrong, and we’ve delivered slightly behind schedule. While our Patreon has shown that we can stick to a monthly schedule, we want to do something bigger, with more moving parts and some physical fulfilment, to prove (both to our backers and to ourselves) that we are ready for all the trials involved.
But we also want to launch Clash by the middle of this year – and that means that we have to have the precursor project done and dusted by that point.

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