Greetings, backers!
We want to make a statement regarding the rumors that say that we have abandoned the game and its players:
We know that the finances of the Publisher are not the backers’ responsibility, but we want to tell you the situation as it currently is, in an attempt to explain the reasons behind our decisions for the people making accusations about Eclipse Editorial’s actions, in some cases very grave ones.
When people see 600.000 dollars collected on a Kickstarter campaign, many think that the publisher has made a fortune with so much money. Nothing could be further from the truth. Under normal circumstances, in Eclipse Editorial we decided to invest it in making the most complete game possible, so to the potential benefits from the projects we had to discount:
- The great quantity of material received by the backers.
- The new modeling of all the miniatures, including the ones from the previous version.
- Some of those miniatures are up to 3 times larger, thus using up to 3 times as much material, so they are more expensive to manufacture, some of them up to 4 times more than expected.
- The mega-expansion’s rulebook doubled its size from what we had quoted originally.
- The amount of content to translate and lay out increased from the original estimations, which resulted in extra expenses.
- The translation and laying out delayed the start of production, which also meant a financial penalty for us.
- And so on, we could continue telling you about all the things that exceeded the original quote.
What we want to say with all of this is:
With Skull Tales: Full Sail! we created the game that our hearts wanted, not the one that the budget allowed. We admit our mistake of wanting to give the backers an experience closer to a role-playing game with endless possibilities, rather than a board game and an expansion.
We would love to create a “living rules” system, where the rules evolve with the players’ experience and that grows with the community. More than 5000 players give an outstanding amount of amazing ideas, as well as high quality “fanmade” material.
Unfortunately, at the time being, we cannot assume the cost of translating and laying out new rulebooks and/or guides to expand the already existing ones. We love the idea, but, being a small company, we have budget limitations and, as we said before, the campaign of Skull Tales: Full Sail! didn’t generate the benefits that would allow us to assume the expenses of keeping a set of “living rules” active.
This doesn’t mean that, after future projects, we cannot turn Skull Tales: Full Sail! rulebook in a “living rules” system that evolves with time, and creating new rulebooks over the same base game. We love the idea, but as mentioned, currently we lack the means to do it.
As always, we want to take this occasion to encourage all those of you who haven’t played yet in fear of the game’s complexity to play the game, like many of the players who have left their testimonies on the Kickstarter’s wall have already done. It’s worth it!
