https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/3dpprofessor/the-royal-game-of-ur-3d-printed-playable-replica
It’s been a long time since I tried my hand at kickstarter. I’m not super practiced at it. So when the button said “Submit for approval (3-5 days)” I foolishly assumed that didn’t mean “Launch right now”, which is what happened. So I fumbled the launch, which gutted my chances of trending on Kickstarter. Now, for most folks that would be it. They’d close up shop and try again in a few weeks. But I’ve got a modest goal, so I’m going to ride this one out. If worse comes to worse I’ll go back to selling them on etsy. Everyone wins.
Is this a reaction to the guy using assets he didn’t have permission to? Yes. But not in a revenge sort of way. People clearly wanted this, and I want to give it to them. Where as the previous kickstarters were clearly hasty cash grabs that in the end would have likely resulted in him realizing he was in over his head and his backers getting half-delivery on their promises, this one is not so mired.
In looking for places to promote the kickstarter, I inadvertently confronted the guy who ran the original campaign.
So his justification for doing what he was doing was that since the game was in the public domain, everything about the game, including new assets created by other people, was also in the public domain. That’s not how it works, and as you see above I explained that to him, though I might not have been the most charitable to him about it. Still, I seem to have gotten through to him because he apologized to me for his behavior in a PM and most of his messages linking to this campaign have been deleted, though he’s still running his campaign on IndieGoGo. Whether it will go through or not, who knows.
In the end I don’t know how this is going to turn out. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. In the end I think everyone is going to be happy.
