Squid Kids Ink’s campaign to release a line of officially licensed SEGA Genesis cartridge figurines has failed to reach its $30,000 funding goal, managing only about $18,000.
“My hopes were really high with having Sega on board for this project, but apparently Mega-Bit didn’t appeal to the majority of their fans,” Squid Kids Ink’s Nate Mitchell wrote to backers. “Running a Kickstarter is no fun at all, failing at it is even worse, but I’m still relieved that it’s over.”
It’s a bummer the campaign didn’t go as well Mitchell had hoped, as he invested about $7,000 of his own money “to jumpstart the tooling.” I helped fund Mitchell’s previous campaign of Mini 10-Doh! figures.
I actually don’t recall SEGA promoting the campaign at all, which theoretically would have helped tremendously considering they have more than 1 million followers on Twitter alone. But hey, this wouldn’t be the first time SEGA failed at properly marketing a product, amirite?
Not surprised, I honestly didn’t understand the point for these.
Games are meant to be played, and if you want to make them into decoration pieces for most collectors they already are decoration pieces.
Sega did in fact promote the Kickstarter, they even had an entire Q&A on their blog which was also mentioned on their Facebook and Twitter account. The failure isn’t their fault, and they can’t go too far in promoting the Kickstarter or they would create the impression that this is a product from Sega themselves, which it’s not. If the Kickstarter would succeed due to Sega’s support but the products don’t get delivered, people could end up going to Sega to ask for refunds. Not a situation they want to be in. For that matter I do have a problem with Nate saying that “Kickstarter is essentially a pre-order system” in the Q&A. That’s precisely what it’s not, and more people need to be made aware of that.