TOR Kickstarter?

[Hirobumi]

Dear nice people from Cubicle 7,

please make something like the Cthulhu Kickstarter Boxset for TOR. Please let me give you my money.
The Cthulhu Boxset looks great. I am kind of jealous.
Honestly, I would pay a lot for such a cool item for TOR.

[Amani]

As would I!

[Mordagnir]

Ironically, I don't want more stuff to haul around when I move... but I am sure I would pitch in money for such a Kickstarter.

[James Harrison]

I expect a lot of people would - especially if it was advertised on BGG and other widely visited places.

[Beran]

I certainly would put some money down on something like this as well, but I don't think money is a problem when it comes to TOR. And then there is the timing issues caused by the legal beagles.

[Hirobumi]

I was hoping that the approval for such a version of the core set wouldn't be a problem since the material is already approved.

[Hermes Serpent]

AFAICT it's probably that C7 have stock of the softback version and are waiting for that to be sold before investing more money in to a hardbound version.

[Hirobumi]

Well but that's the point about Kickstarter: they wouldn't have to invest a large amount of money. But they would have to invest time of course.
We don't know how the legal situation really is. But my post was only meant as a signal to C7 that maybe some people have great interest in a collectors version of TOR. And I already own the German limited edition which is awesome! Still I would love to get my hands on a limited UK version, with some nice maps, some handouts...

[Hermes Serpent]

I'm afraid that KS isn't the panacea that fixes business issues in the rpg community.

A well managed KS campaign costs immensely in personnel in setting up a KS campaign and doing it right.
At least one person needs to be on social media and other outlets constantly for nearly the whole campaign to keep up the interest level. Jon's done it for the Cthulhu London campaign just finishing and it has taken him away from much of his day-to-day job with C7.

Until recently C7 didn't have spare staff laying around to do such a campaign and depending upon progress with other lines may not have enough staff even now. Staff cost money and a good KS campaign needs the product mostly completed; probably only art and layout costs still to go. Now getting the book to that point is costly in of itself and even if you go with only minor updates to the existing text if still needs a layout check to make sure everything is still OK.

If nothing else changes but the addition of a hard cover then a lot of people are not going to pay the cost of a hard bound book for minor errata and a hard back. Fresh art, a fabric bookmark, leather binding and a slipcase can be sold at a premium as a collector's edition but that takes it out of reach for people that want to play rather than admire it on the shelf.

Design Mechanism has just done a campaign to get a hardbound version of RQ6 out to people and it was exceptionally well managed with easily met/limited goals, plenty of updates and worthwhile additions. If C7 ran a TOR campaign like that then it's possible that the load on staffing might not be excessive and they would have a lot of happy TOR fans but DM only produced a few more than the number needed to fulfil the campaign with hardly any books left over. That's not necessarily a business model C7 want to go for with one of their premium product lines.