Should you, an indie zine creator, be worried about a large project eating your lunch?

Short answer: No
Long answer: A thread

1/x

A quick look at todays numbers show projects going up. I’ll be able to verify the overall stats tonight, but I’m willing to bet the overall impact of TOR on zines so far has been nothing. Theres no way to argue with “I could have made more if” but lets look at some data.

2/x

Last year 91% of zinequest funded. There were 5 large projects that each made over $200k during the same period. Zinequest alone made over $860k. As of yesterday 84% of projects have funded with many more on track to do the same. Zinequest is at $665k in HALF the time.

3/x

There is money in the pool. And the 2 largest determining factors of success are still

1) Has someone heard of your project?

2) Once theyve heard of your project will they spend money on your project?

4/x

There are currently 232(ish) active zinequest projects and from heavy spenders the question before TOR ever dropped was “how do I choose what to buy?” Some of that is personal reputation. Some of that is art.

5/x

Some is just a clear evocative pitch. “This is what players do and this is the context they do it in and this is the system used to do it.” Clear backer levels help, because its much harder psychologically to unback than to back. Make it easy to be excited and say yes.

6/x

This all just good practice for running kickstarters though. Lets get more specific. Twitter is not the rpg market its part of it. Its where a lot of creative energy comes from.

7/x

But raise your hand if you dont know anyone who plays Shadowrun and yet it shows up on the most played games list on Roll20 etc consistently year after year. Guess what other game has a long tail of play with a large player base who isnt super active around here?

8/x

There is not 1 to 1 overlap between consumers. There are some. You may lose some sales. But a lot of their customers were not your customers. Only fl or kickstarter can tell but I would guess given the scale a lot of their backers are first time kickstarter users.

9/x

The good news for projects already launched is: the majority of current active projects end mid February. TOR ends in Jan. So even if that overlap in fandom affects you directly, for some percentage of those buyers they will not be sharing monthly budgets.

10/x

Theres been some back and forth on whether big kickstarters bring more money to smaller projects and…

I dont know. In earlier years when kickstarter wasnt a thing it legitimately did! Theres open data available showing just that. But its been a while. A long while.

11/x

Is that still true? Its worth looking into. There is an upper limit to that once platforms gain mass trust and mass appeal. Its a question to look into but any answers either way right now are probably speculation.

12/x

Im not here to answer moral questions for you and if you have an opinion on that I cant imagine Id sway you in one direction or another. I dont want to. But what I do want to do is assuage your concern. This will not be the thing that tanks your project.

13/x

Have feelings. Have opinions. But I promise you the best thing you can do is focus on spreading the good word of the project youve created and the other projects you love. Retweet them. Talk about them. Write threads about them. Go yell on discord and reddit about them.

14/x