Why not have a Kickstarter to get a price drop?

[Maratus]

The Pyra looks incredibly promising, and contains many features that other devices are severely lacking, why not start a Kickstarter to try and get a price drop for manufacturing the device? No game console outside of the Pandora has a fully keyboard like the Pyra does making the Pyra able to emulate ANY game including older PC games; no mobile device runs Debian out of the box making the Pyra the easiest option for libre software lovers and hackers to start developing their own software on the exact same device that they can take with them on the go, and NOTHING out there has these features together with a 10 hour battery life! The only thing stopping the Pyra from becoming the next Raspberry Pi or Ouya is the price point. Why not try and use the features that are all already working on the Pyra to get a Kickstarter going?

 

[gunrock]

How would that work?

So people purchasing the device would pay more to get a lower RRP? How is the price lowered for them?

Alternatively, people who have no interest in buying a Pyra, fund the Kikcstarter, so that other people get a cheaper Pyra? Is that what you think will happen? Benevolent rich people lowering the price of a nice electronic handheld gaming device for the poor plebs? 

:rolleyes:

Edit: Nice should = niche, in that last sentence.

 

[benoitb]

I'm curious to learn how this could lower the price. I guess it would help ED at least to have the money upfront, but that may not result in lower prices.

 

[comradekingu]

A kickstarter increases the price. It may be move viable, but nontheless more needlessly expensive.

 

[elw3]

The question lies in "get a price drop for manufacturing the device"
How makes kickstarter devices cheaper in production? 

Also " The only thing stopping the Pyra from becoming the next Raspberry Pi or Ouya"
I hope it never becomes like that, the Ouya is horrible and the PI massively lost ground to cheaper better china clones. 

 

[bzar]

A kickstarter may lower the price in three ways I can think of:

1. Getting orders of magnitude more orders, resulting in a possibility of a better deal with manufacturing/parts companies due to volume. Probably not going to happen for Pyra. Getting to the next level from a few (maybe ten, fifteen) thousands of units the current price is probably calculated with probably needs hundreds of thousands of units sold. I'm kinda skeptical Pyra could reach such numbers with a price that pretty much can't in any way go lower than at least 400€ due to production costs. All numbers here are generated using the famous Stetson-Harrison method.
2. An initial drop in profits in hopes of getting more sales in the long run as the early adopters spread the word. Given that many of the potential customers in this case probably get the device right away, selling it to them at a low profit seems kind of self-defeating.
3. Sell stuff other than Pyra at lower reward tiers, estimate impact and use the estimate to cover part of the pyra profit for KS backers.

Collecting money using kickstarter actually causes the price to go UP somewhat due to KS taking their cut from the money. Any benefits will first need to cover that before justifying a price drop. Case 1 above would end up losing even more money if such deal could not be negotiated, and case 2 would mean the price drop would cut even more deeply into the funds to actually make the devices and gather profit for wages and further development/manufacturing. Case 3 is also kind of a gamble and quite possibly wouldn't even cover KS cut from the Pyra sales.

Anyone think of any other ways KS might lower the price?

 

[pmprog]

Anyone think of any other ways KS might lower the price?

Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, or some other almighty tech firm with too much money might buy Dragonbox and thus be able to spend beeellions in "improving" the device with 4k screens and 8-core 20GHz FGPA with ARM, x86, x64, XboxONE, PS4 and 3DS cores... only at the minimal cost of adding many years to the production cycle
 

 

[Maratus]

A kickstarter may lower the price in three ways I can think of:

1. Getting orders of magnitude more orders, resulting in a possibility of a better deal with manufacturing/parts companies due to volume. Probably not going to happen for Pyra. Getting to the next level from a few (maybe ten, fifteen) thousands of units the current price is probably calculated with probably needs hundreds of thousands of units sold. I'm kinda skeptical Pyra could reach such numbers with a price that pretty much can't in any way go lower than at least 400€ due to production costs. All numbers here are generated using the famous Stetson-Harrison method.
2. An initial drop in profits in hopes of getting more sales in the long run as the early adopters spread the word. Given that many of the potential customers in this case probably get the device right away, selling it to them at a low profit seems kind of self-defeating.
3. Sell stuff other than Pyra at lower reward tiers, estimate impact and use the estimate to cover part of the pyra profit for KS backers.

Collecting money using kickstarter actually causes the price to go UP somewhat due to KS taking their cut from the money. Any benefits will first need to cover that before justifying a price drop. Case 1 above would end up losing even more money if such deal could not be negotiated, and case 2 would mean the price drop would cut even more deeply into the funds to actually make the devices and gather profit for wages and further development/manufacturing. Case 3 is also kind of a gamble and quite possibly wouldn't even cover KS cut from the Pyra sales.

Anyone think of any other ways KS might lower the price?

That's the gist of what I'm thinking of. I'm not the most well versed when it comes to dealing with manufacturers, but I do know that you can DEFINITELY work out a better deal with them if you can show that you can move units. Working a deal with manufacturers to have them sell their parts to Evil Dragon for less if Evil Dragon meets their funding goals can allow for the campaign to promise a cheaper Pyra than originally intended. In addition, extra money can be used to lower the costs of assembling by expanding the workforce to meet higher demands. The main idea is to just get people to talk about the Pyra by the strange power of kickstarter managing to make tiny projects for small markets blow up in proportion.

 

[_jr_]

But as B-ZaR said, there is reasonable doubt that the market is actually larger than a couple of 10,000 units and that such a volume would be enough to significantly reduce the price (compared to the production runs planned by ED, probably 1,000 units or so) without making the added kickstarter costs counter productive.

 

[pmprog]

He also explained why the other two points probably wouldn't work. I think my "possibility" where you attract some major corp attention would be the only real way, but that's unlikely to happen.

 

[_jr_]

And not to forget: thanks to ED, most customers will already be getting a significant price reduction because of the mass manufacturing of the Pyra. The handcrafted prototype units will cost 4 times as much (and this price doesn't even include development costs).

 

[rygD]

Anyone think of any other ways KS might lower the price?

Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, or some other almighty tech firm with too much money might buy Dragonbox and thus be able to spend beeellions in "improving" the device with 4k screens and 8-core 20GHz FGPA with ARM, x86, x64, XboxONE, PS4 and 3DS cores... only at the minimal cost of adding many years to the production cycle
 

With all their money they could probably have it done in 2 months.  I vote for Amazon, or maybe one of the other ones not mentioned (I have a couple in mind that probably wouldn't do anything like this, but if they did they could keep it "strictly business" and I would still love it...as long as they didn't rip out the gaming controls, that is).

 

 

[pmprog]

Anyone think of any other ways KS might lower the price?

Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, or some other almighty tech firm with too much money might buy Dragonbox and thus be able to spend beeellions in "improving" the device with 4k screens and 8-core 20GHz FGPA with ARM, x86, x64, XboxONE, PS4 and 3DS cores... only at the minimal cost of adding many years to the production cycle
 

With all their money they could probably have it done in 2 months.  I vote for Amazon, or maybe one of the other ones not mentioned (I have a couple in mind that probably wouldn't do anything like this, but if they did they could keep it "strictly business" and I would still love it...as long as they didn't rip out the gaming controls, that is).

I might have agreed with you in the Occulus Rift wasn't still drifting through space - The "Estimated Delivery" was 2012! With Facebooks money, this should have been wrapped up by now

 

[TrashyMG]

I'm totally disillusioned on Kickstarter and I have a feeling many like me are feeling the same. I've had so far 3 of the 7 Kickstarters that were successfully funded actually deliver a product. Out of the 4 that failed to deliver, only one is actively still trying to deliver after two years. 

 

[pmprog]

Yeah, I've only back two things, both were due at the end of this year. Matt Grey's tunes are now due end of Jan, and the beta of Pocket Rumble is still not yet released (though I believe the alpha is to those backers).
Thankfully, they weren't expensive (wouldn't have backed them if they were), and if they fail, well, I don't consider it a big loss (I have plenty of LN remixes and fighting games already)

That said, I'm kind of sick of this whole "Let's get people to pay so I can make something". System 3 are talking about crowdfunding a Last Ninja HD remake, not only with a money goal, but some arbitary backer count too. Feck that, build the game and if it's any good by the time you finish, I'll buy it. It's this whole "I'll risk 'customer' money rather than my own, then if it breaks down, I'll just walk away" attitude.

I think the other thing that puts me off, is that you can promise something to the backers for the funding, but then radically change your project goals after you have their money... You know, like online only for Elite Dangerous, and undoubtedly the specs of the Oculus Rift...

You want my money up front? Tell me exactly what you're making and stick to it...
</rant>
 

 

[erico]

There is no such thing as a cheap good tech.

Funding campaigns are good for spreading the word. I latest acquired a gamebuino from this campaign at indiegogo: (unit at E40)
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gamebuino-an-arduino-handheld-console#/
As you can see, e very well done presentation, it made E33k.
The campaign was flawless with everything made and delivered on schedule time + a nice forum with a nice active community. Rodot rocks!

6 months later I stumbled into this arduboy campaign at kickstarter: (unit at $40)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/903888394/arduboy-card-sized-gaming
Pretty much a copy cat campaign, even the video and the games used on it from other people´s campaign without a notice.
On my books, an ok handheld with inferior tech compared to gamebuino.
It collected $500k.

They later added links to the other arduino handhelds to the campaign as it becomes a bit ugly to use the merits of others on your self campaign without at least crediting people.
That also led to a flood of people on the gamebuino page/forum and probably added a few more sales as the gamebuino already exists and so an emulator for it.
Most of the people that came from the arduboy did so because they never knew gamebuino existed in the first place.

So, I learned that kickstarter is maybe a good place to spread the word, but yep, it will raise the price, there is no way the amount of interested people reaches the huge number of part´s order needed to actually lower the price from the distributor. You can see from these campaigns that the former was funded with ~800 people while the later took on 7k people.
I believe any reduce in price would require more then 10k orders? maybe 100k?

Also, I can´t see how the prices can go any lower with all the details Ed has been giving, unless some compromise in quality is made, which we won´t accept.  

So at the end it will be awesome and expensive. I will probably be left out of the party since buying such thing in Brazil is going to be horrendous.
Maybe when some friend goes to Germany I can get one. 

 

[WizardStan]

I think the other thing that puts me off, is that you can promise something to the backers for the funding, but then radically change your project goals after you have their money... You know, like online only for Elite Dangerous, and undoubtedly the specs of the Oculus Rift...

The rift is actually a very good example of crowdfunding done right.  It was delivered more or less on time, exactly what was advertised (minus the Doom3 which they couldn't actually get for reasons I've forgotten).
The campaign is over, the funding was for the development kit, and all development kits were shipped years ago.  They were successful.  They took that success and have started using it to build on.
I don't understand why you would be complaining about the specs of the OR changing since it has only gotten better in every conceivable way since the campaign ended, but that's irrelevant because everyone that pledged in the campaign got what was advertised: success!

 

[pmprog]

I think the other thing that puts me off, is that you can promise something to the backers for the funding, but then radically change your project goals after you have their money... You know, like online only for Elite Dangerous, and undoubtedly the specs of the Oculus Rift...

The rift is actually a very good example of crowdfunding done right.  It was delivered more or less on time, exactly what was advertised (minus the Doom3 which they couldn't actually get for reasons I've forgotten).

The campaign is over, the funding was for the development kit, and all development kits were shipped years ago.  They were successful.  They took that success and have started using it to build on.

I don't understand why you would be complaining about the specs of the OR changing since it has only gotten better in every conceivable way since the campaign ended, but that's irrelevant because everyone that pledged in the campaign got what was advertised: success!

My apologies, I didn't realise the kickstarter was purely for the dev kit, I thought it was for a consumer unit.

 

[Chip]

While KS campaigns can be hugely successful, there is no guarantee.  How many more people out there are eager to fork over ~$500 for a pyra that aren't already on board?  I've shown my pandora to a lot of folks, and hardly any of them "got it".  It's just not the sort of device that many people are looking for, and it's certainly not impulse-buy cheap.

ED would have to figure out how many pyras he would have to sell to get enough volume discounts and startup-cost-spreading to make a KS campaign worth the hassle.  Then he'd have to figure in the cut that KS themselves take, and make sure his suppliers/factories can even handle the larger batches.  It's probably worth running the numbers, but I wouldn't bet money that they'd come out all that great.

The pyra prototype is almost complete enough to meet KS's requirements.  If there are no fees for creating a campaign or having a campaign fail, then there probably isn't any harm in giving it a go.  But I just don't think it would get enough support to make the numbers necessary to significantly drop the price.

 

[TrashyMG]

^ Yeah from my experience helping Link run the Ithic Booth at PAX East in 2013, The Pandora takes a bit of work to explain and many don't get it even then. I've had a bit of people that were blown away by it was seriously thinking about getting one until I mentioned the price.