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Please Kickstart Elevation of Privilege

Jan-Tilo Kirchhoff asked on Twitter for a printer (ideally in Germany) to print up some Elevation of Privilege card sets. Deb Richardson then suggested Kickstarter.

I wanted to comment, but this doesn’t fit in a tweet, so I’ll do it here.

I would be totally excited for someone to Kickstarter production of Elevation of Privilege. Letting other people make it, and make money on it, was an explicit goal of the Creative Commons license (CC-BY-3.0) that we selected when we released the game.

So why don’t I just set up a Kickstarter? In short, I think it’s a caesar’s wife issue. I think there’s a risk that it looks bad for me to decide to release things that Microsoft paid me to do, and then make money off of them.

Now, that impacts me. It doesn’t impact anyone else. I would be totally excited for someone else to go make some cards and sell them. I would promote such a thing, and help people find whatever lovely capitalist is doing it. I would be happy to support a Kickstarter campaign, and would be willing to donate some of my time and energy with things like signing decks, doing a training sessions, or whatnot. I even have some joker cards that you could produce as a special bonus item.

So, if you think Elevation of Privilege is cool, please, go take advantage of the license we released it under, and go make money with it.

[Update: I don’t have exact numbers, but have seen quotes for quantities around 5,000 decks, production might be around $2-3 a deck. At smaller quantities, you might end up around $5-7 a deck. YMMV. So a Kickstarter in the range of $5-10K would probably be workable, although you’d certainly want to think about shipping and handling costs.]

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