|
Post by monkeypretzel on Feb 28, 2023 21:05:34 GMT -5
Today's (2/28/23) Kickstarter Update makes it clear that while you retain your ability to watch Season 13 and all related content (shorts, live events) with your previous Gizmoplex pass/subscription, there will be very little new content coming for the immediate future, aside from what has been promised already like the Jackbox and RiffTrax events, and that there is currently no information on new passes for new content aside from that Season 14, when it comes, will require a new pass:
Several of you have expressed concern about what happens to your Gizmoplex access after today, when your passes “expire.”
The answer is: nothing happens! You will retain access to all the episodes and livestream events that came with your pass. Our first year of Gizmoplex programming has come to a close, so we won’t be doing regular livestream events every two weeks for the foreseeable future, but everything else on your pass will remain intact.
That said, we do have a few more events to share with you that we promised as part of the Kickstarter campaign, like the live Rifftrax event (more on this soon) and the Jackbox rematch. We may also summon some additional surprises in the coming months, and we will keep you updated as things evolve.
But we wanted to reassure you all that the expiration date on your pass does not mean you are losing access to anything you currently have access to. You will eventually need a new pass for our next season, but we are still in the very early planning stages for that. When there is more to share, you will be the first to know. Pinky swear.
This means that the only revenue coming in* will be from new viewers who buy a pass to see Season 13, the events, and the shorts, or from those who rent or buy the previously made content. Lesley, the credited writer of the update, said in an answer to a question in the comments that the monthly Vault Picks/Synthia's Selects are not planned to continue, although that decision isn't final:
We are considering whether to continue Vault Picks in some form, although it's too soon for me to promise anything. We will definitely update y'all here when there's more to share.
With that admission, and the statement that they won't be doing livestream events every two weeks, it seems that new content on the Gizmoplex is going to be scarce for a while.
Also, it's a possibility that the classic episodes on the Gizmoplex will become ad-supported before a Season 14 releases, Again, from an answer by Lesley to a question:
Classic episodes will stay for now! There is a possibility they may become ad-supported at some point between passes (as classic episodes already are on the MST3K channels on other streaming platforms) but that is still an open question to be decided.
What I find interesting about this is that the biggest supporters of the Gizmoplex, the Kickstarter backers and those who purchased a Gizmoplex pass after the Kickstarter was over, are effectively being cut out of providing any more funding toward a Season 14 until a Season 14 is announced, as of now. To me, that more or less assures there's going to be another big Kickstarter or other fundraiser to raise the millions needed for more episodes. There's been quite a lot of asking in the Discourse Forum and elsewhere about when backers/pass holders can re-up their subscriptions since the Christmas episode premiered. Are they leaving money on the table with this delay? Why are the plans for Season 14 still only in the "very early planning stages?
*Edit: I forgot to take into account the advertising revenue from appearing on Pluto starting tomorrow. But I can't imagine that would run into 7 figures.
|
|
|
Post by BoB3K on Mar 1, 2023 14:09:53 GMT -5
All very interesting. I would say that going with a stretch of silence on Gizmoplex might allow people to drift away, but then Joel always seems to have the ability to ramp the hype back up when needed.
|
|
|
Post by Megalon on Mar 2, 2023 11:04:30 GMT -5
I feel like the past 6 years of MST3k history can be summed up in one sentence: "Trying and failing to attract a new audience." The fact that the Gizmoplex is going dark after one season suggests that we're in for another long hiatus as Joel searches for another route to profitability. If the Gizmoplex had attracted a new audience (as any new season of a show is meant to do), then we wouldn't have to wait for Season 14. It would be in post-production now, with the first episodes ready to air next week.
Unfortunately, another hiatus means another potential cast shake-up, which means another break in continuity. I don't know about everyone else, but these breaks are having a seriously negative impact on the show for me. In fact, they're the main reason why I never bothered to watch Season 13. At this point, I don't even want to get attached to new cast members, because I can't trust them to be around a month or a year from now. The show simply doesn't feel comfortable or familiar any more.
|
|
|
Post by BoB3K on Mar 2, 2023 12:18:14 GMT -5
"Trying and failing to attract a new audience." I think that's half, and the other half being the core audience it does have is large enough (~30K) and willing to give enough (~$6 mil or $200 per person) to keep a modest show going. Maybe not this time, as the new cast (no offense) is a few rungs lower on the success ladder than the 11/12 cast.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Mar 2, 2023 13:02:09 GMT -5
I think its too soon to say if the Gizmoplex is "going dark" or failed to become self-sufficient. Or that they're starting over with a long hiatus.
I do think, however, they've bungled the end of the first year. There should've been plans made to leverage the end-of-season into a Gizmoplex-specific pledge drive, or some other mass engagement event(s) leading up to some kind of Season 14. You have a captive audience, that's seemingly engaged...ENGAGE THEM.
But now...subscriptions have ended and you have to re-herd cats ALL OVER AGAIN when/if you do Season 14.
Maybe the G-Plex never attracted enough non-Kickstarter'd money. I don't know. All I know is they should've been using the last 13 months while new eps were being released to do everything they could to plan and save up for future seasons. And they might've, I don't know.
But they paid for G-Plex. They built it. They built a subscriber base. That was the half of the ostensible purpose of the last campaign "build the future home of MST3K". It might not mean exclusivity, but it needs to mean SOMETHING.
We'll see what they say at the season wrap up. But if they don't show concrete plans for the next Season then and there...yes, we could be in for another long hiatus.
|
|
|
Post by floatinginspace82 on Mar 2, 2023 13:41:58 GMT -5
We'll see what they say at the season wrap up. But if they don't show concrete plans for the next Season then and there...yes, we could be in for another long hiatus. I really want NUMST3K to thrive but this ebb and flow they have now, I don't know anymore, I want to give Joel the benefit of the doubt but its hard to do. His deal with Netflix and "The Return" and the the "Gauntlet" while it was more on Netflix and imposing their own rules, with the Gizmoplex felt better but I still feel like something is missing. Hoping that season 14 if and when I comes into being gets a bit more of that magic that made the original show what it was.
|
|
|
Post by Megalon on Mar 2, 2023 14:57:00 GMT -5
"Trying and failing to attract a new audience." I think that's half, and the other half being the core audience it does have is large enough (~30K) and willing to give enough (~$6 mil or $200 per person) to keep a modest show going. Yes, that's the glass-half-full side of things. I'm glad there are so many devoted MST3k fans out there willing to support the show as it struggles to find its footing. Also, I don't think it's necessarily the show's fault that it has seemingly failed to attract new viewers. As I've said before, I'm a fan of the Netflix seasons and thought they were just as consistently funny as the original. If you had asked me a few weeks into the Netflix run what would come of the reboot, I would have said that it would bring in a large influx of new viewers -- enough to rival the old audience in size and devotion -- but nothing like that seems to have happened. Why, I don't know.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Mar 2, 2023 16:09:12 GMT -5
I think there were a few reasons why the Netflix series didn't attract massive amounts of new fans.
Partly it's because as we've all discovered, the binge-viewing format simply doesn't work for MST3K. It just isn't bingeable. And efforts to make it bingeable just make it worse, structurally. See season 12.
MST I really think works best as a channel surfing phenomenon. You come across this weird movie and there's characters talking over it and it looks interesting so you stick around and you go from there.
The other problem with binging and releasing everything at once like Netflix did was that once it's released, it's done. You get maybe a week of decent exposure and then it's gone. If people didn't like the first episode or two they're not going to stick around and sit through another 10 hours and find the good episode they liked.
The other half of why those Netflix episodes didn't bring in the huge amount of new fans: they just weren't well-made or consistently very good. I know people will disagree but they simply cannot hold a candle, production-wise to the classic seasons. I like season 11 on the whole, but it looks and feels really rushed. The editing is terrible. Some of the episodes are pretty darn good but a lot of them in the back-half are slogs, writing and performance-wise.
And then you follow that up with the mess that was season 12...
I think if they'd released Season 11 weekly or monthly like they did with the Gizmoplex but on another large streaming service like Amazon Prime, or even on broadcast cable, I think you would've seen a bigger audience today.
But regardless of all of this, they have to figure out what they want the future of the show to be. Because at this point they tried mass appeal and it clearly didn't work well enough to sustain multi-million dollar seasons without asking for handouts.
There aren't going to be any magic "new audiences" at this point. Netflix was the new audience. It didn't happen. It isn't going to be anything more than a cult classic with 30k-50k devoted fans. And that's fine.
(There MIGHT be another 30k-50k MST fans still out there they could tap for cash, but I'm assuming they're casual, too old to go beyond broadcast cable/didn't understand the Gizmoplex concept, or were turned off by what they saw on Netflix to give Season 13+ a chance.)
Regardless they've got to figure out a way to make new content using the resources they have available from those fans without returning to the well of asking for 6 million every two years.
And again, that WAS the point of the Gizmoplex, I thought. Subscription fees. Renewable source of income. But if they never reached the threshold of engagement to make it self-sustaining then I don't know.
The easiest thing is just to do another fundraiser via the Gizmoplex so they can just bring in cash without a middleman, but at some point you're going to get some pretty bad diminishing returns. Because I'm pretty sure the selling point of the last Kickstarter was that they were building a platform that would eliminate the need for the big seasonal fundraisers (although I'm sure they may never have explicitly said that, just like how they never explicitly said the new episodes would be exclusive in perpetuity).
I don't envy Joel and co. going forward.
|
|
|
Post by BoB3K on Mar 2, 2023 19:10:33 GMT -5
Two thoughts--
1) It could just be that MST3K as a unique novelty is just over. Back in the 90s, someone picking out an obscure old movie and then refreshing it with riffing and skits and introducing it to the larger world was cool new and unique. (yeah I know there were some similar things like Joe Bob Briggs or USA up all night, but MST3K was really in a league of its own.) Nowadays though, from the birth of DVD releases and commentaries and beyond that to YouTube and the internet, there is a never ending flow of old, weird, unique movies being rereleased (Manos in HD), riffed, mocked, and even made new (Birdemic). The specialness of MST3K may just be a one time, or more aptly, one era thing.
2) I know this is kind of a dead horse but-- Joel and Money. It's entirely possible that MST3K is where it is right now (and will be after each crowd-funded season) because even with a mostly successful season 13 and a mostly successful gizmoplex, that the money side of things never gets figured out. Just like season 11 and 12, all the money was spent, things were accomplished, but no new money was brought in, then everything ground to a halt, again. ...At least until Joel puts on his barker's hat and tries for the next round of money raising.
|
|
|
Post by monkeypretzel on Mar 2, 2023 22:33:03 GMT -5
What surprised me most was that there doesn't seem to be any urgency at all about getting more content, including a Season 14, started and going on the Gizmoplex.
From the very beginning of the Kickstarter, the goal was to make a "new, sustainable model" for MST3K, to build the Gizmoplex as a permanent home. Yes, they did keep that promise...for now. But the question is still on the table as to how sustainable it really is, without new content coming out on a reasonably steady schedule. My guess is that the revenue from Pluto TV and Amazon Prime sales and anywhere else they distribute Season 13 is enough to keep the lights on and pay salaries and maybe produce a few live events but not nearly enough to fund new episodes.
Doing a season every 18 months to 2 1/2 years is reasonable if it's a Netflix model where the whole season is released at one time. I know a lot of fans were excited because they believed, and were led to believe by Joel and company, that the Gizmoplex meant they wouldn't have to wait that long for new content, shows would be produced and released more quickly. Does anyone see a Season 14 happening any time before Q3 2024 at the earliest? It's not going to be this year given the lead time every other season of new MST has taken, even after the funding was secured, and honestly I don't see them being able to ask for more crowdfunding until they get the rewards from the last Kickstarter delivered. There's not even an estimate on when that will happen, currently. Maybe that's why they're dragging their feet, but how much of the limited momentum they had are they losing? Like Diet Kolos put it, they have to re-herd cats all over again in three months, six months, a year, and like Megalon said, the continuity of getting comfortable with a cast and their delivery is ruined with these long hiatuses. Even big fans can drift away and find new things to watch and invest in.
|
|
|
Post by Diet Kolos on Mar 3, 2023 7:17:12 GMT -5
I forgot about physical rewards for the last Kickstarter. I opted for digital-only.
I seem to recall that they were much more subdued in offering physical rewards than they were with the first Kickstarter, because those rewards took so long to come out the first time. But I know they offered stuff, like a snowglobe.
That may be a very big problem. Physical rewards are expensive to start with. With rampant inflation between the time the Kickstarter closed and now, they could be out quite a bit of money trying to secure rewards that may have doubled, tripled, quadrupled in prices from their original supplier.
That may very well be where all their attention and extra funds have gone towards, instead of starting pre-production on any new content.
|
|
|
Post by monkeypretzel on Mar 3, 2023 12:23:29 GMT -5
There was quite a delay in receiving some of the physical rewards to their storage warehouse, due to COVID delays and supply chain issues (most merch is manufactured in China), but they posted back on 12/1/22 that they finally had all the merch in the warehouse ready to go. So why haven't people received anything yet other than the 3D glasses? (Which I recently found out cost $4 to ship one cardboard pair)
The decision was made that in order to save money, they would ship all the physical rewards out (except for the DVD/Blu-Ray) at one time to each domestic backer, including the overstock rewards from the last Kickstarter that were offered. This was supposed to happen beginning about a year ago, when they would let everyone know how much they owed for shipping, since it wasn't collected either during the Kickstarter or when people completed their BackerKit surveys. (Again, this was to save money, so that NuMST would not have to absorb any shipping fee increases themselves during the wait to receive merch.) Apparently during this year wait, no one thought to do the paperwork and get shipping weights prepared ahead of time for each order. So since December 1st, they've been working on getting the shipping costs for each order ready to send out to backers. This is elaborated not in an email or a Kickstarter update, but in a help file that was a blink and you miss it link in one of the recent updates. From that help file (https://help.mst3k.com/article/169-why-are-physical-rewards-taking-so-long):
To fulfill your rewards, we must partner with a warehouse to hold all of the items as they are manufactured, shipped, and received. In the first part of this process, the warehouse is simply accepting boxes and holding them in a space, so there’s not a lot of complexity to it, aside from the sheer volume of tens of thousands of items.
Once everything has successfully landed in the warehouse, then the distribution phase begins, in which our partners at the warehouse calculate shipping for each pledge. Then we collect that shipping cost from each backer, after which the warehouse ships everything out. Our initial campaign had over 36,000 backers, so again, it’s a lot.
The failure point in this process is that we did not understand how much time calculating shipping would take this particular warehouse, after all the physical rewards had been received. No doubt there are other warehouses out there that could do this much quicker. Unfortunately all of our rewards are in this one warehouse already, and moving them to a different warehouse now would be a significant expense, and would also take a big chunk of time to do, which would mean further delays.
We are motivated and eager to get your physical rewards to you as soon as possible. We just found out too late that the warehouse we partnered with isn’t as quick as we expected or hoped. And to be very clear, this explanation is not meant as an effort to shift blame. We are responsible for fulfilling our promises to you, and we are doing our best. We hope sharing these further details will help illuminate the circumstances better. If you have additional questions, please contact us at kickstarter@mst3k.com.
They're not trying to shift any blame, but it's totally the warehouse partner's fault, folks! More to the point, it's obvious to me anyway and probably to some of you that they simply don't have the money to hire any additional help to get the process done any quicker. Some of the delays are understandable, but this last one has at least a few backers genuinely upset, and I can't blame them for being so.
|
|
|
Post by BoB3K on Mar 3, 2023 13:44:45 GMT -5
I didn't know about any of that KS reward stuff. Well, that is definitely bad news for having any money left to start a next season. It's also very bad news for starting the next fund raising. It's probably a big reason why they haven't yet. That would be beyond a bad look to ask for more money before finishing delivering what was paid for in the last round of funding.
I've always had issues with KickStarter bonuses and stretch goals. They've slowly morphed into a kind of sickness where people expect all this extra and exclusive stuff when initially the purpose of crowd-funding is to help someone create something that you want to see created, somewhere between an investment and a pre-order.
I think it depends on the product too. Like if you have a KS up for a board game and your stretch goals are just some more bits in the box, or maybe better bits, that's not really going to change your production process, just add more cost which is what KS stretch goals are covering.
In other cases, like MST3K's, giving stretch goals that are essentially a completely separate product from your main goal is just counter-productive. Like literally, forcing the creation of whole separate processes that the creator very likely has no real experience in.
|
|
|
Post by majorjoe23 on Mar 3, 2023 15:44:48 GMT -5
There are definitely issues. If I'm paying for a comic book and a bonus involves stickers or prints, that doesn't seem like a big deal, since printing all those things isn't so very different.
But if someone is making a TV show, something like a snow globe seems totally out of the area of expertise for them to create. So that means working with outside partners, which will only slow things down.
|
|
|
Post by Megalon on Mar 3, 2023 17:35:13 GMT -5
I didn't know about any of that KS reward stuff. Well, that is definitely bad news for having any money left to start a next season. It's also very bad news for starting the next fund raising. It's probably a big reason why they haven't yet. That would be beyond a bad look to ask for more money before finishing delivering what was paid for in the last round of funding. I've always had issues with KickStarter bonuses and stretch goals. They've slowly morphed into a kind of sickness where people expect all this extra and exclusive stuff when initially the purpose of crowd-funding is to help someone create something that you want to see created, somewhere between an investment and a pre-order. Yes, I feel the same way. When I donated to the first Kickstarter, I selected the no rewards option because I didn't want to water down my donation. I don't blame people for accepting rewards if they're offered, but I think Joel should offer fewer rewards in the future, and maybe only rewards that the MST team itself can deliver without the need for outside suppliers and manufacturers. Scripts, props, special credits, etc. That sort of thing.
|
|