Clay is leaning into this strategy with the new Capstone+ program.įor $20 a year, customers will get 20% off every Capstone game purchase, plus the real reason gamers might join: Capstone sends the first shipments of all games to Capstone+ subscribers before anyone else, including retail partners. Like all publishers, owning a larger share of each and every dollar is a big part of the path to not just profitability, but really being able to build a business with a long-term view on customer loyalty. Capstone looks like it is going to lean harder into their sweet spot-games for serious hobbyists-that has led to the creation of Capstone+. ( As we now know, Capstone is making a fresh foray into crowdfunding with a project soon.)Īnd what about that audience? Capstone’s Simply Complex line doesn’t seem like the future, both in terms of the existing line of lighter games and the lack of announcements for any upcoming games in that vein. “I don’t think that’s the model for us” was his initial response, before admitting that crowdfunding would be an option for games that are slightly outside of the core Capstone audience. What about Kickstarter, or crowdfunding in general?Ĭlay smiled. (Only a slight exaggeration)Īnd while I’m sure some people are upset over a delay in getting other Capstone products (”Where the heck is my copy of Juicy Fruits?”), someone, somewhere must have said this year: Ark Nova is the cash cow.Īlthough Capstone has worked with designers to crowdfund other projects- Pipeline and The Estates, for example-the firm has mostly worked with partners such as Feuerland and Deep Print Games to identify the kinds of games that fit Clay’s heavy strategy tastes. While everyone has their fair share of stories, it was intriguing to hear about how delayed and/or damaged crates of Ark Nova affect the gaming world in a unique way, since, um, EVERYONE has been trying to get a copy of Ark Nova this year. That showed further when we spoke about the only real hiccups for Capstone this year, the ones that all publishers are facing: shipping delays. But it’s the staffing and logistics angle that we talked about more than anything else, a bit of an obsession around that piece of the pie. Obviously, Clay cares about the games, or the Ark Nova train would have surfaced with a different publisher. The focus on logistics was further cemented when I saw the Capstone warehouse and offices. I still haven’t had a box show up with missing pieces or packaging problems. Certainly, I know what I’m getting-a quality game that is well produced and a bit of a brain burner-but I’ve been impressed even as a customer when I have bought games from the Capstone website. In this way, Capstone as a publisher shines most to me as a reliable provider of goods and services. Each time I chat with him, I grow more and more convinced that he cares most about one single thing: logistics. I’ve had the chance to meet with Clay five times over the last 12 months. The blistering success of Ark Nova has certainly been the biggest win for Capstone over the last 12 months-and a source of some of its only problems-but the laundry list of other well-designed games is hard to ignore. In the last two years, it’s been amazing to watch the success of Capstone from a distance. Even in 2018, when Meeple Mountain’s first interview with Clay went live on our site, we knew that Capstone was destined for something special as a US-based publisher of medium-to-heavy weight strategy board games. Over the summer, everyone was sure this game was going to be a hit, and at Essen Spiel 2021, the world got to see the game Feuerland was so excited about: Ark Nova.Ĭapstone Games has had quite a run the last few years. They inquired if Clay would like to publish it in North America.Ĭlay didn’t hesitate sight unseen, he trusted the team from Feuerland because of their many shared successes. The team at Feuerland was direct: this new game was one of the best games they had ever seen. They reached out to Clay because Capstone is the North America distributor for other Feuerland “Black Label” games such as Terra Mystica and Gaia Project. Their team had been developing a game by a new designer for months. The phone of Clay Ross, president of Capstone Games, rang Feuerland was on the line.įeuerland is a premier publisher of medium-to-heavy strategy games, based in Germany. Justin met with Clay Ross to dive into the Capstone philosophy and learn more about the Ohio-based publisher to see what the future holds
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