Plaid Hat pulls funded The Monolith Kickstarter after pledges ‘stagnated’ on day two, plans post-Gen Con relaunch

Plaid Hat Games has cancelled its successfully-funded Kickstarter for upcoming title The Monolith three days after launch, saying it failed to give prospective backers enough reasons to pledge rather than wait for retail.

The Monolith quickly beat its $15,000 funding goal after launching on June 25, but Plaid Hat CEO Colby Dauch told BoardGameWire pledges had “completely stagnated” by the second day of the campaign.

That led the publisher to scrap the crowdfund for the Phil Gross-designed game on day three, having collected $27,400 from 290 backers.

Dauch said Plaid Hat plans to relaunch the crowdfund shortly after Gen Con with additional content and more pledge tiers, while keeping the game’s existing delivery timeline intact – with manufacturing having already begun on the title.

That manufacturing process has included Plaid Hat spending $35,000 on plastic moulds alone, given the large amount of plastic components in the game – including the namesake monolith, a large plastic tower which sits at the centre of the board.

Dauch told BoardGameWire the company estimates it would have to sell 10,000 copies of the game in order to spread the mould cost widely enough that the retail price could be kept down, adding that the long lead times on making plastic moulds was a big motivator in starting manufacturing prior to the campaign – as well as a desire to launch the game at a convention this year.

Plaid Hat said in an update to Kickstarter backers, “While we hit our funding goal at a decent rate, almost as soon as we did, the pledges stopped. Another 24 hours passed, and the needle didn’t move.

“Of course, we had questions since we’ve run several campaigns now and this experience is completely new to us.

“What we found was that our visually striking campaign was drawing in lots of people, but they weren’t pledging.

“While there wasn’t a ton of feedback, one thing we heard on several occasions was, ‘Why pledge now? Why not just wait for retail?'”

“For everyone here who’s backed, you already know the answer to that question, but we must acknowledge the simple truth that along the way, we could have done better.”

The company added in a follow-up post on BlueSky, “We could have limped over the finish line, but it would have been such a disservice to a game worthy of so much more.”

Dauch told BoardGameWire that all of Plaid Hat’s prior Kickstarters had followed the common practice of setting a low goal amount which can be quickly celebrated as having been beaten, providing momentum for the campaign.

But after seeing The Monolith quickly fund before effectively flatlining, Dauch said reaching a funding target was no longer enough to demonstrate sufficient market demand.

The company has said it will revisit that practice in the wake of cancelling The Monolith, instead likely setting the target as costs plus a certain margin that would need to be crossed to indicate there is enough overall enthusiasm from backers.

Dauch told BoardGameWire, “I think it is just public knowledge that there are certain rules you have to follow to make a Kickstarter work.

“We’ve tried to challenge some of the rules – for example, as a company we try not to lean too hard on FOMO to get people to pledge.

“But we’ve accepted other rules for success as standard practice in a crowdfunding campaign. One of those rules is that you really want to set a low goal that you can blow past early.”

Asked whether the game potentially suffered due to its $90 price point – not necessarily that it was too high, but that it fell between the extremes of ‘very affordable’ and ‘massive, multi-hundred dollar multibox crowdfund’ – Dauch told BoardGameWire:

“I think there is evidence that people want a variety of price points they can buy into, and we are exploring options to make that happen. I think that is more to blame than being in some middle ground.”

Plaid Hat has been making successful board games since 2009, when Dauch created the company to sell his highly-regarded card-based fantasy battler Summoner Wars.

The publisher scored another hit with animal-themed co-op adventure game Mice and Mystics in 2012, and followed that two years later with the hugely successful Dead of Winter, which scooped a string of awards – and big sales numbers – for its thematic mix of zombie survival, traitor mechanics and story-driven gameplay.

Plaid Hat was bought by Asmodee in 2015, but became a rarity five years later as one of just two studios which have gone on to become independent from the publishing and distribution giant.

The publisher only began running crowdfunding campaigns two years ago, having become free of a “first refusal” distribution deal with its former owner that had made experimenting with something like a Kickstarter campaign functionally impossible.

Dauch told BoardGameWire Plaid Hat had long delayed embracing Kickstarter because it was uncomfortable with some of the accepted conventions of crowdfunding, including the pressure to create artificial urgency.

He said, “The reality is that we held off on doing crowdfunding campaigns for a long time as a company because parts of them do feel artificial and we weren’t looking to deceive anyone.

“These large companies on Kickstarter don’t NEED the campaign funds in order to fund a project. It’s self-evident from the fact that a campaign must have a certain amount of polish and progress to even be taken seriously, which already represents a sizeable investment made to get a game to that state.

“Our decision to enter the crowdfunding arena was based on the belief that we were missing out on a portion of the market that enjoys getting their games through crowdfunding campaigns, not because we could no longer fun projects on our own.

“We felt that crowdfunding has been such a mainstay for so long, that most people who participate in them are aware that this is how many established companies use Kickstarter – as a sort of pre-order campaign.”