Aliens v. Predator - The Hunt Begins Miniatures Game

[Corporal Hicks]

Looking good bro! Has anyone played any games yet?

[[cancerblack]]

Still got one Pred and a couple of Aliens left to paint up before my first set is complete, so I haven't taken it for a spin yet. General consensus seems that the Alien side is a bit under powered, although I have my suspicions that that has more to do with people zerg-rushing into the teeth of guns in lieu of tactical thinking, than it does game balance. I might build up a "hero" creature to lead them if they do turn out to be lackluster.

[Corporal Hicks]

Someone picked up from Essen. I assume part of his pledge.

[[cancerblack]]

Note sure about that guy, but another person picked up some of their pledged items and took more photos. Still unclear if they are selling wave 2 at Essen to non backers but the stickers make it seem pretty likely.

[PRJ_since1990]

For those that might have missed it, most recent update from Prodos. Not very promising for those (like myself) who have yet to receive our stuff:

Prodos Games Ltd says:

Good morning all, let me start this update with a bit of Prodos history. It might not seem necessary, but it will probably help explain some of the wider points.

The company was founded by a team of 3 passionate hobbyists believing that we can really change the industry with the latest 3D technology and an utterly unique resin casting process. Two of us were existing, longtime fans, of Mutant Chronicles and have played the previous incarnation of Warzone when we were kids. Looking at the market, we identified a gap and decided to bring Warzone back onto the market via Kickstarter. That went reasonably well, until the point when we needed to fulfil KS. It was at this point that we began to face many unexpected issues.

Due to several poor calculations, the largest of which was shipping in waves, we ended up with a near 60k shortfall. The fact that it was our first Kickstarter, we sought little advice and our calculations was totally incorrect. Luckily for us, the Warzone line was received very well on the market, far exceeding our expectations, and we have managed to make enough profit to cover that initial loss.

As you may know, we are not alone in this struggle and many others have a similar story to tell when trying to break into the miniature gaming market. In fact, many companies are running KS after KS just to fulfil their previous KS. This is the case for us as well, we initially went with AvP on KS to get everything straightened up with Warzone and to make sure that we won't have to come back on KS again, ever. Not that we don't like Kickstarter, but we don't think it's a great way to continue our business.

The plan was to get AvP, and release the game within 6 to 8 months at the most, the team was working very hard on it to make the product that will WOW our customers. As you can probably remember from our earlier updates, we were making fantastic progress, sharing pictures regularly of concept art, WIPs, samples and even completed figures.

But as it is with any plan, something always goes wrong and for us, it's actually lots of things.

Starting with a huge cost increase in manufacturing, approximately 30% from our original quotes, and ending on the pressure of having a readily available product on the market by a set date.

We decided to take a risk and spend our manpower on casting add-ons for AvP to keep as many of our staff in work for as long as possible, hoping that one day soon the game would go public with all of the add-ons and that, with that in mind, we could make it back quickly. However, constant delays caused us to be sitting on almost 650000 GBP of product in our warehouse just for add-ons alone, that's 3 times more we need for fulfilling the AvP Kickstarter.

So why is there such slow shipping?

There are two problems we need to solve, the first problem is to cover the cost of shipping (which again, increased by a large amount since the project opened) and the second is to increase capacity on packing and sending the KS out.

After the multiple waves shipping fiasco with the Warzone KS, we decided that shipping in waves is not an option at all. Hence all calculations we have done on KS were taken just in consideration of 1 shipping wave, hoping that we would have the entire product line approved in one go. Nowadays, kickstarter creators give an option to backers to pay for multiple waves of shipping or to just wait until the full product is ready to go, we had not considered such option (check out any of Modiphius Kickstarters, you will see this is the case). However due to the cost of warehousing an approved game, with none of the add-ons approved, in our warehouse, we decided to go, yet again wrongly, in waves. As shipping in waves requires extra funds and we needed contractually to have the game on the market, the AvP board game was released and sold publicly. Also as the cost of manufacturing went up by 30% between 2013 and now, the money we had collected for shipping was used to cover that increase. To cut it short, we are funding the shipping costs from any profit we are making, in some cases to the detriment of our team.

The same goes for profit we are generating on our 3D or casting services for other companies. Some of you might know what we have been making product to cover almost 12 other companies KS, and this profit went into fulfilling the shipping costs of wave 1, wave 2 and now wave 3.

Just to make this clear, we, as Prodos, are not asking anyone to pay more than they have paid via KS. We are explaining the situation in order to hopefully allow you to better understand our situation and with that, kindly asking to a bit more patience and during that time we will solve the issue of speeding up with shipping. Of course, we do not expect you to be happy and we do expect you to be annoyed by this.

We have been considering several ways of making it faster and will gladly take on board any other options that you have that we have not considered (service@prodos.co.uk):
1. Go again on KS with a miniatures product, we really have a proven records of delivering of miniatures to the market. Profit generated on that KS would be assigned for shipping of this KS. Pure miniatures, no cardboard or printed material, no IP hence no delay due to approval.
1. I won't hide the fact that we have been approached by a much bigger company that is interested in buying Prodos as a whole, along with its licenses, as they are mainly interested in our manufacturing know-how, however we really need to make sure that new owner will fulfil what KS backers have paid for. Until we have this guaranteed we won't be able to make this call. If this can be guaranteed, then the new company has the capacity and funds available to easily complete the shipping of this range of all 3 waves.
2. Release the add-ons as soon as we have approval on them and use the profit to speed up the shipping and getting more staff for packing. This may mean releasing them to the public before backers which we are loathe to do.
3. Final option is to go public to find investors to speed this up.

So how long it will take to get all games out at this rate if we don't go with any of the options above?
We have shipped so far 1785 board games + approx. 230 were collected at various shows. We are looking at another 2.5 to 3 months of Prodos profit to clear 1st, 2nd wave and 3rd wave of shipping. Add-on miniatures or cost of board game manufacturing is not an issue as add-ons are manufactured and the KS version of the board game paid for.

We are at Crisis, in Antwerp Belgium, with the Kickstarter version of AvP (for backers only) and a collection of add-ons. If you are visiting us please send us an email (service@prodos.co.uk). Please bring you PM paperwork as we are unable to hand out copies without this.

For any of you who have received KS versions of the game, please contact michal.pawlaczyk@prodos.co.uk in regards to returning your boxes, we will cover the cost of this.

The pledge manager will be opened tomorrow morning, you can make any changes you wish to your order there. We also request that you please double or triple check your address and details. You can access the pledge manager here: http://calc.prodos.co.uk/

If you do not wish to make any changes, you can close it, or simply leave it open and we will close it when the time comes.

Also, there are roughly 300 backers who have not updated their details sufficiently, please can you check your addresses? We will look at listing these by postcode next week.

We'd like to reiterate that we have approval on some of the range (Royal Guard, Queen, Crusher, Warriors, Power Loader, Weyland-Yutani Commandos, Predalien and Predator Hell Hounds), we have the stock for the approved stock and are looking to get it to you as fast as possible. All we can say is that we're sorry that you haven't got the game at this stage but we are looking at trying to get it to you as fast as possible.

By Friday of next week, we will be dispatching another 500 copies of AvP to Kickstarter Backers. We will make sure to update you on this.

Playlist of new releases:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist...
Powerloader: https://youtu.be/ddBAgEa5SdM
Predalien https://youtu.be/4ytRIVhy9vo
Alien Queen https://youtu.be/p3pmD33-gZo
Crusher https://youtu.be/05TduvQwWaU
Royal Guard https://youtu.be/ZLbkTosxWiI
Alien Warriors https://youtu.be/h6pMuIcT22k
Hellhounds https://youtu.be/CMeqdM36-NI

Many Thanks
Prodos Games LTD

[[cancerblack]]

A month on and as far as I can tell, my replacement pieces haven't been sent yet. Which means there's 21 Aliens and 8 marines that I can't build.


Update: I've been complaining loudly all over the internet today and lo and behold, Jarek replied within minutes to one of my posts. If only you could get that level of service from their customer service email address.

[Corporal Hicks]

I'm not feeling overly confident for the future of the game 

And turns out Rob Alderman has handed his notice in at Prodos too.

[[cancerblack]]

To be blunt - as long as I actually get all the models I payed for in the end, I couldn't care less about the game itself. Not that I have any desire to see Prodos go under or discontinue AvP, if they can make this a long lasting game then hooray, but if they struggle to the finish line on backers items and then don't renew with Fox, well, at least we've got the figures.

[Corporal Hicks]

I was interested in it as a game so I'm somewhat disappointed by the possibility that Prodos might go under because of their mistakes. Seems like a true case of biting off more than they can chew.

Edit: Wooo. My 20,000th post was a negative one. Yay. 

[[cancerblack]]

If the statement about someone big being interested in buying them is to be believed, then that's probably more likely than them going under completely. Their models really are amazing so I'm not surprised to hear that, I just hope that Jarek sticks to his guns on the whole "we'll only sell up if the new owner agrees to fulfill AvP pledges" thing. On the other hand, and I could be totally mistaken here, I seem to remember something about buy-outs being a potential "out" in the KS terms...

[Corporal Hicks]

http://shop.prodosgames.com/en/62-addons

Expansions are now available.

[[cancerblack]]

What they don't mention anywhere as far as I can see, is that this is a pre-order and nothing will be shipped till November 5th.

[Eldritch_DM]

This makes me sad. I hope they don't go under before the majority of this stuff is released. I still haven't even got my copy of the game itself much less the expansion models. Really drooling over that Crusher, Praetorian and Queen.

[[cancerblack]]

Interestingly, now that they DO mention on their store that the AvP stuff is pre-order (still not on the items, but on a scrolling banner on the home page), I got an update saying my order was being picked. Hopefully they pop it in the mail before the 5th. My replacement pieces are finally on their way to me too.

Naraku, what country are you in?

[Eldritch_DM]

Interestingly, now that they DO mention on their store that the AvP stuff is pre-order (still not on the items, but on a scrolling banner on the home page), I got an update saying my order was being picked. Hopefully they pop it in the mail before the 5th. My replacement pieces are finally on their way to me too.

Naraku, what country are you in?

USA. My local gamestore told me their distributor said it was to release in October so I had them preorder it for me, then they told me it wasn't going to release until November so then I started to get worried and then read the above post from Prodos lol.