About this project
NF Magazine: Year 2 Subscriptions
$68,491
1,972
If you've arrived here too late and still want to subscribe to Year 2 of NF Magazine, you can do so directly through our online store by clicking right here! For a limited time after the conclusion of the campaign, subscriptions through the website will also qualify to receive the free print copy of Issue #1 that was unlocked as a stretch goal here! So get moving!
Below, the campaign page's contents from its final day, preserved:
Hey there, Kickstarter audience! Thanks for checking out NF Magazine, coming to you from the Nintendo Force. Maybe you've already heard of us, and maybe you haven't. But whether you've been with us from the beginning or you're just now jumping on board, this campaign is the place to join the Force for 2014!
Our funding goal has been achieved! We're now using the remaining days of our campaign to push forward and hit stretch goals to enhance our Year 2 issues and add bonuses to everyone's subscriptions!
- Update #16: Huge Succeeded! $64,000 Stretch Goal Achieved + Surplus Goals!
- Update #15: Kickstarter Ends Today + Reddit AMA!
- Update #14: New Add-Ons, Free Digital Issues for the Curious + The Inbox is Open!
- Update #13: The NF Show Podcast!
- Update #12: Refer Your Friends, Get Free Games!
- Update #11: Interview with 4 color rebellion + New Column Announcement!
- Update #10: Jonathan Holmes and the Power of Print
- Update #9: New Pledge Tiers, Volume 3 – Get a Game with your Subscription: Tadpole Treble, Treasurenauts or Shovel Knight!
- Update #8: Victory Achieved! + The Quest for Stretch Goals
- Update #7: New Pledge Tiers, Volume 2 – Contribute a Comic!
- Update #6: Add-Ons! First-Class Shipping and Issue #7
- Update #5: Introducing Player 4 – Say Hello to Lucas' New Baby Boy, Calvin Martin Thomas!
- Update #4: Stretch Goals, Volume 1 – Free Print Copy of Issue #1?
- Update #3: New Pledge Tiers, Volume 1
- Update #2: Whoa! We're Halfway There!
- Update #1: 47-Hour Sale on Issue #7!
Don't miss the new Update #12! You do want some free video games, don't you?
If you've already subscribed by making a pledge and choosing a tier, you might now want to consider adding on some add-ons! Add-ons are extra things that you can tag onto your existing subscription order, if you want to. They're optional, and not everyone will want or need to take advantage of them. But they're pretty snazzy enhancements to your Year 2 subscription if you do choose to go for them!
Here's how add-ons work:
STEP 1: Click the "Manage Your Pledge" button up near the top of the campaign page.
STEP 2: Increase your pledge amount by the number equivalent to the add-on(s) you want. Don't change your pledge tier! Add-ons aren't new tiers you're picking, they're just tagged on to the tier you already picked.
EXAMPLE: Say your pledge tier selection is the $25 Early Bird Print Subscription. If you want to upgrade that print subscription to first-class shipping speed, you'd add on $7 to your earlier pledge amount of $25, making it $32 instead. You'll then confirm with us in your backer survey after the campaign's over that you want the first-class add-on, and you're all set!
Got it? Here are your add-on options, starting with the one we just used for that example:
For more details about the first two add-ons, please read Update #6! It's got the full explanations for them. For the second pair of add-ons, check out the full explanations in Update #14. And if you've got more questions after that, hit us up using the Message function here and we'll answer them for you!
Here's where the fun really begins! We've already hit our bottom-line funding goal of $49,000, so we've raised enough money to pay for the printing, packaging and shipping costs of all of our Year 2 issues. But if we can now go above $49k, we can start enhancing those issues and offering our subscribers some fun bonuses too. Take a look:
Stretch Goal #1 has been hit! We'll celebrate the success of our Kickstarter campaign by giving all of our backers new desktop wallpaper versions of Thor's art seen in the campaign video above – the Mighty No. 9 cast illustration first published in Issue #6, and the "They Can Dig It!" piece that brought together Shovel Knight, Dig Dug, Drill Man and all of the rest of gaming's most notable digging characters in Issue #7.
Stretch Goal #2 has been achieved! We'll now be able to begin realizing one of our early dreams for the magazine – including physical, fold-out posters with original artwork, suitable for hanging on your wall. (Just like the classic Nintendo Power issues did, except that our posters won't be stapled into the issue, forcing you to rip them to remove them.) Thor is already hard at work on this first poster, and it will have a Mario Kart focus to tie in with Issue #8's coverage of Mario Kart 8. (Digital subscribers will get this art in desktop wallpaper form.)
Stretch Goal #3 has been smashed! This one wasn't a sexy instant gratification bonus for our backers, but it is essential for Year 2's issues to be able to be created with as much quality and care as possible – so far, all of NF Magazine's issues have been put together solely as a labor of love. But it's time to start paying this team, don't you think?
We did it! A full print run of Issue #1 has been funded by us hitting the $64,000 stretch goal, so a copy of our original debut issue will now be sent to every Year 2 subscriber for free!
We hit this last stretch goal with less than seven hours remaining in the campaign, so rather than us deciding what any extra money beyond $64k will go to support, we're going to let democracy determine how we use any surplus. After the campaign's over, we'll poll our backers and ask for your opinions about these three different Surplus Goal options:
If you want more posters beyond the one that will be included in Issue #8, let us know! If more consistent page count is your priority, vote for that! If you like us to explore the option of printing our issues on heavier stock, make your voice heard!
Questions? Comments? Concerns? Hit us up through the Get in Touch box at the bottom of the NFMagazine.com home page.
You guys rock!
Here's some background info for you. Back in December of 2012, Nintendo Power Magazine shipped its last issue. That got a lot of long-time Nintendo fans upset, as NP had been the one consistent and reliable print magazine covering Nintendo video games ever since the '80s. Some of us had been subscribers for over two decades, and there were still tens of thousands of active subscribers getting new issues delivered in the mail up until that final issue.
Well, we didn't want to see that legacy die. So we assembled a dream team of the most well known Nintendo journalists from around the world and launched a new magazine just a little over a year ago – the first issue went on sale on January 11, 2013, exactly one month after Nintendo Power ended.
Now, NF Magazine is not Nintendo Power. But we're carrying the torch forward into the future by paying homage to the best parts of NP's past while forging a new identity with an all-new team.
Want to check out some page previews, to see what NF Magazine has already done throughout the previous year? We've got a series of "Look Inside" pages available on NFMagazine.com for you to browse – clicking on any of the magazine covers below will let you jump over to our site and peek at several pages inside each one. You'll see some similarities to the old NP, and some things that are totally new and totally NF. All together, it's like a highlight reel of Year 1!
Nintendo Power’s final issue went on sale on newsstands on December 11, 2012. Exactly one month later, on January 11, 2013, the first issue of Nintendo Force went live. Made available only through the print-on-demand service of MagCloud and set at a steep price of $17.99 per copy (print-on-demand is expensive), the debut issue of Nintendo Force nonetheless overcame that obstacle of prohibitive cost and soared to shatter all of MagCloud’s sales records – it became the most successful single issue in the history of the site, with thousands upon thousands of copies sold (and more are still being added to that number daily). The incredible reception proved that an audience still existed hungry for Nintendo games coverage in magazine form, and propelled us to pursue subscriptions and enter production on a full year of follow-up issues.
How do you follow up such a huge success as our debut issue? By making a sequel issue that is itself all about sequels! Rather than just creating one magazine after another defined only by the time of their release, we established the practice of having an overall theme that guided the content of each new issue here with #2 – and the first theme was celebrating all the other #2s out there. We also featured Luigi as our cover star for the first time in “The Year of Luigi” (he’d go on to appear on two more covers before the end of 2013), and this issue was also the first to be offered to subscribers! Issue #1 was a standalone product, existing all by itself. Issue #2 is when subscriptions – both print and digital – first began, so anyone who signed up to join the Force in advance of #2′s release became a true NF Ambassador.
The team was really getting into the swing of making new magazine issues by the time we tackled our third, which appropriately featured the King of Swing himself on the cover. Donkey Kong’s connections to Hollywood’s legendary giant ape King Kong – along with the arrival of the 20th anniversary of the live-action Super Mario Bros. movie – inspired us to make our theme for this issue “Nintendo at the Movies.” This was also the issue that ushered in our NF Magazine iPad app, giving us a “third pillar” of distribution for new issues. (It was on like Donkey Kong.)
In the wake of a great showing for Nintendo at E3 2013, our hopes for the future of the 3DS and Wii U were high – so we embraced that spirit of looking ahead to tomorrow and combined it with a Mario & Luigi: Dream Team cover to create “Dreams for the Future” as our fourth NF Magazine issue theme. If you’ve been a fan of Nintendo for years and years like we have, you know that beyond actually playing Nintendo’s video games, the most fun you can have as a fan is speculating about what’s coming next from the company. What next sequel will be revealed? What developer will be the next to take on your favorite franchise? What crazy thing will Mr. Iwata say or do in the next Nintendo Direct video? Dreaming about the future is a blast, and we celebrated that fun in this edition.
With the simultaneous worldwide release of Pokémon X and Pokémon Y coming just around the corner, the Nintendo Force jumped straight into exploring what awaited trainers in the all-new Kalos region in our fifth issue, Pokémon Power! (We even went a little wild with the layout, as print issues featured a flippable cover – the mystical Fairy-type Xerneas represented Pokémon X on one side, while the destruction Dark- and Flying-type Yveltal posed menacingly on the opposite side.) You can check out both covers in more detail (along with page previews from inside the issue) by clicking the image above!
For our final issue of 2013, we were inspired by both the upcoming holiday season and the great variety of new multiplayer games that would be launching for Wii U and 3DS just in time to become Christmas presents for millions of Nintendo fans around the globe. So multiplayer became our focus, as we encouraged our readers to take advantage of the parties and family reunions that naturally happen around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s each year and enjoy some Nintendo game time with friends and family – playing games like Wii Party U, Mario Party: Island Tour and our cover game, Super Mario 3D World.
Lastly, we come to Issue #7, our final issue of NF Magazine's Year 1 subscription cycle. Anyone who became a subscriber before this Kickstarter launched was able to secure a copy of this issue, but if you're new and would still like to grab one for yourself, you can jump over to NFMagazine.com's online store.
This Kickstarter campaign is primarily focused on funding production for our Year 2 issues, but if you're just now joining us and want to get caught up on the previous issues you see above, some of the pledge tiers will accommodate you by offering copies of them as additional rewards for backing. We're also offering stretch goals that, if reached, could let you nab them for free in addition to your Year 2 subscription!
So why are we on Kickstarter now, after having already been in business for a year? Because producing a print magazine is a risky venture. It's one of the reasons Nintendo Power shut down – creating physical magazines, printing them in bulk and mailing them out to thousands of people around the planet is a massive undertaking each and every time you do it.
But when our first issue went on sale a year ago, the outpouring of support was so enormous that we knew it would be safe to open up full-year subscriptions. So we did, and thousands of you joined the Force by buying print subscriptions, digital subscriptions or a combination of both. We made enough money that we were able to cover the production costs for a full year of issues – the costs to print all of the issues and package and mail them around the world.
Now we're on Kickstarter because we want to do it again. This is the campaign for NF Magazine, Year 2. We're seeking to raise the amount of money we need to print, package and mail another full year's worth of magazine issues. That's the funding goal for the Kickstarter campaign – once we hit that mark, we know we're secured to be able to keep doing what we've been doing for another year.
Second, Kickstarter offers us the unique opportunity to set defined stretch goals above and beyond the bottom-line funding goal – and if we hit those, too, we'll be able to enhance our Year 2 issues by including bonuses like posters, and also be able to fuel production budgets to help each issue be the best that it can be. Thus far, every member of the Nintendo Force has been working pro-bono – producing the great content of this magazine with no compensation, solely working to keep the legacy of Nintendo Power alive. I'd love to pay this amazing team!
Thirdly, Kickstarter is an amazing platform for getting the word out about any kind of creative project – and there are still thousands upon thousands of Nintendo fans out there who haven't heard about us! There are people who are still sulking, bummed that Nintendo Power got canceled over a year ago now, and who just don't know that there's a new team carrying the torch forward today. Kickstarter is a signal booster to reach out to more of those people, and new fans will be able to sign up for Year 2 Subscriptions using this same campaign page.
And that's the last reason to go to Kickstarter – simple organization. There are thousands of you out there now, and having everyone go through this process and pick which type of subscription you want for the year ahead helps us get everyone organized, make sure everyone's mailing addresses are up-to-date and all of that unglamorous behind-the-scenes stuff.
Beyond the team members pictured above, several more have helped make NF Magazine a reality – especially all of our subscribers who joined us for Year 1!
This Kickstarter is a little different than most, in that we're combining two categories of supporters together – our existing subscribers and all-new fans who are just now joining us. For the most part, this campaign's rewards are Year 2 subscriptions of various types – digital, print or digital and print together in a combo.
If you've already been a subscriber with us, this campaign is the place where you will renew your subscription for another year. We decided to offer renewals in this way for organizational purposes – all of our existing subscribers are getting Issue #7 as their last issue. It's the finale for Year 1 of NF Magazine, and it's actually being released on the same day we're starting this Kickstarter campaign. If you've enjoyed what we've done so far, then sign up for another year, won't you? Your continued support will mean that we can keep going for another year, and you'll get to continue getting new NF Magazine issues delivered to your mailbox or your email inbox for another year.
And if you haven't yet become a subscriber, or if you're just now hearing about our magazine for the first time, this is the perfect time to jump on board! Scroll through the different pledge tiers and look at the options we're making available – as mentioned above, some of them will allow you to get caught up on the issues you've missed while also getting your name on the list to receive our future issues for NF's Year 2.
And if you support this Kickstarter campaign, you won't have to wait to see the benefits of your pledge – the first issue of our Year 2 cycle will be released in March, just a few weeks after the conclusion of this fundraiser!
This campaign's going to carry on through mid-March, and you can keep tabs on its progress by coming back to visit this page, heading over to our home base on NFMagazine.com, liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter.
Nintendo Power got unplugged – and that still stings, even a year later. But NF Magazine is here to keep carrying the torch forward into the future. Help us to do it, won't you? Join the Force of Nintendo fans!
Risks and challenges
Unlike many creative projects that come to Kickstarter to seek funding as only conceptual ideas or works-in-progress, NF Magazine has already been in production for over a year. We've created and published seven issues so far, and we've gotten into the groove of what it takes to make new editions happen on time. There's very little risk involved here – we just need your help to gather the funds needed to continue doing what we've already been doing!
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Funding period
- (46 days)