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A Postmortem: How NOT to run a crowdfunded project

I spoke about my experiences with the crowdfunding for “Perilous Roleplaying Game” by Jordan Palmer previously, both back in January, and again earlier this month. Neither of these articles painted a very positive view of the project, or of its creator Jordan, but both were accurate and specific to the problems that have plagued “Perilous” for years.

Well, I am happy to state that the situation has changed. The other day, after over nine months of silence, Jordan dropped an update on the Kickstarter page for the game, stating that the majority of the books have now shipped! He did state that there are approximately 80 copies that are “short” (missing), and he is working with the printer and distributer to figure out what happened, and how to resolve the issue. This apparently should take a month or two to resolve, and may take doing a second print run. Regardless, Jordan is apparently on the case, and looking to get every order delivered.

I have to say that this is good news, it really is. Jordan is getting packages to their backers/pre-order recipients, and says they are looking into fixing the shortfall issue. Great, this is nothing short of a win for the folks who backed “Perilous”.

That all said, let’s take a look at where this all went wrong, and why Jordan’s most recent statement doesn’t come anywhere near close enough to explaining their failings.

The primary problem all along has been with a lack of communication, both on Kickstarter and Gamefound. Even before the nine months without an update on KS, Jordan would go months without posting updates, and had to begged, cajoled, and basically driven into reporting something… anything… about the project. Remember that he had posted back in July of 2022 that books should be shipping to backers at any time, as he had his copies delivered… Then there was nothing from him, on any platform, until just this week.

Not acceptable.

Let me remind you that Kickstarter expects their creators to post updates at least on a monthly basis to backers. From the KS Help Center:

What should I post an update about and how often?

Scormus
I'm the editor, publisher, and primary "talent" here at Scormey.com.
https://scormey.com

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