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5. The Emotional Toll
Leading a struggling Kickstarter campaign is not a fate I would wish upon my worst enemy. The project consumes your every waking moment (and dreams) with a constant whine of stress. Our worst day was April 21 when République took in a meager $729 from 31 backers, bringing us 0.0015 percent closer to our goal of $500,000.
There's nothing worse than when your Kickstarter dries up like that. People avoid making eye contact with you. They act like your dog just died, or your girlfriend just cheated on you. It's a time of quiet reflection and common questions: "Are you guys going to be okay?" "Think you'll try again?" and "I hear Zynga is hiring."
I was saddened by the depressed state of our Kickstarter. In fact, there was a stretch of three or four days when I didn't even check the page, instead waiting for the happy phone call from my dad (who says he refreshed the page over 1,000 times) saying, "Ryan, you seeing this?!" that never seemed to come.
But overall, I'm proud to say that I stayed positive and realistic about the campaign after the devastating first 72 hours. I knew the team was looking to me to assure them that we'd survive as a studio, and I knew that miracles could happen. Penny Arcade could blog about us! IGN and Geoff Keighley could tweet about us! Some dudes with $10,000 may just feel compelled to pledge one day! And you know what? I'm happy to report that all of those things eventually happened.
It's still surreal for me to sit here and write this postmortem, knowing that I'm chronicling the very happy event that we were able to gather $555,662 in pledges for our game République, thanks to 11,611 generous souls.
Now, let's go over what went right with this whole crazy Kickstarter experiment.
What Went Right
1. Exhaustive Prep Work
I was wrong in assuming that our Kickstarter would go nuclear right out of the gate, but I shudder to think where we would have been without the extensive preparation we did. For two months, I applied my ghetto Excel skills and tracked daily numbers from the best and worst Kickstarter projects to better understand pledging trends.
One of my biggest takeaways was that successful projects were getting average pledges of around $50, which is triple the $15 that most projects were asking for the baseline game. In every case, it was because thousands of backers were looking to connect to the project behind just the core game -- they wanted art books, soundtracks, cloth maps, collector's editions -- a physical connection to the game that they feel is missing from many new releases today.
This led me to dream up some ideas for a cool collector's edition as well as doubling-down on an idea I was bouncing around prior to our Kickstarter: packaging our iOS game with a fictional book companion, which we ended up pricing at $50. The journal and the collector's edition were two big components that led to our eventual success, accounting for over a third of our pledges.
As part of my prep work, I also made sure to integrate myself as much as possible into the Kickstarter community by becoming a backer of multiple projects and learning what I liked and didn't like about the process and certain projects. I'm surprised whenever I talk to future Kickstarter hopefuls who have never personally been part of this process. Even if you're strapped for cash, pledge $3 to a project you like so you can get on their Backer Only mailing list -- it's a front row seat to their development status and one of the most fascinating aspects of Kickstarter.
We put a lot of work into developing memorable pledge rewards with short and snappy text descriptions. We also tried to make our page as visual as possible, knowing that most people wouldn't bother reading our page text. In fact, I'm sure I'm not alone in admitting that I've backed dozens of projects never having read their pages.
I think we were right to assume that it's all about having a great video, although I'm a little confused as to why only 20 percent of our visitors watched our entire pitch video. Was it because they were already sold on the project before the video ended and then pledged? Were they turned off by something? Did they see my purple jacket and killed their browser in disgust? We will never know...
Finally, we put a lot of thought into the start and end time for our Kickstarter project. We intentionally started ours at the beginning of the workweek to give the campaign time to generate online buzz before the first weekend. We went live at 5 a.m. PST to be present at the beginning of the day for both East and West Coasters of North America.
We were also very deliberate about the time and day that our Kickstarter ended, avoiding a common mistake -- the final hours can be some of the most exciting and accessed times for your entire Kickstarter campaign, and many projects mistakenly set their end time for when people aren't generally on their computers, like 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning.
I think we were smart to set our end time for 3 p.m. PST on a Friday -- a time that we assumed would allow many eyeballs to be on our project, including dedicated backers, potential pledgers, and members of the media. On our final day, my phone was ringing off the hook with writers wanting to write stories about our final hours, something that wouldn't have happened if we ended our campaign on a weekend.
2. Focus On The Team and Game Vision
I believe that the primary reason why we found success on Kickstarter was because we were pitching the community on a great game. Our video wasn't perfect, we announced it exclusively for a controversial platform, and were a little late to the Kickstarter party, but the fact remains that we got a lot of attention of gamers, press, and investors because the game looked good and showed off fun and innovative gameplay. In this regard, the hard work that the teams at Camouflaj and Logan did really paid off.
Having done a successful Kickstarter project, I often get emails from other project leaders asking for help and advice on why their project isn't doing well. So often they are focused on areas of their campaign that are completely outside of the actual game that they're pitching, which I believe is a mistake. This sounds harsh, but the realities of Kickstarter is that you will have trouble if you're pitching another retro platformer or space shooter that doesn't communicate quality and some sort of exciting new hook.
One thing I got wrong early on was intentionally disassociating the team from the project. With our first pitch video, I kicked it off with our game trailer and then deliberately minimized the on-screen time for myself and other team members to keep the focus on the game. Cindy Au of Kickstarter helped me realize that this was a mistake -- that our project initially felt cold and lacked a human element.
For subsequent videos, we spent more time getting each team member on camera and letting the audience know more about their background in the game industry. And while I hated to do this (because I wanted République to stand on its own), I eventually changed our 50-word project description to make note of our previous projects like Halo, Metal Gear, and F.E.A.R. Why? Because I found that I was personally guilty of only checking out projects with some familiar names attached to them. Hell, I've already got some money set aside for Chris Avellone's rumored Planescape: Torment Kickstarter...
On that note, I think the Kickstarter deck is definitely stacked in the favor of developers with notable prior game development experience. Too often I haven't backed a project because I looked at the team's pedigree (or lack thereof) and suspected that they lacked the experience to deliver on what they were promising. But back on the subject of game vision, if quality and innovation is clearly shown in your pitch video, like in the case of Castle Story, I believe that the community will overlook any lack of name value associated with your project.
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We are doing pretty much Ok, and most probably we will reach our humble 10k goal, but I think that you are completely right about feeling like the feedback is confusing.
Kickstarter fatigue will increase. It's a 'me too' phenom already. Unique, then novel, then interesting. How long until it's passe? Reminds me of Ray Kurzweil's predictions - innovations will sweep through our lives with ever increasing speed.
That's a pretty incendiary statement to make. Which campaigns have actually been guilty of this?
That being said, I have heard discussion between some people that are weary of "gambling" on some of the less known projects. For example the Planetary Annihilation kickstarter seems to have gotten some praise for being a very experienced team behind it.
Take the Defense Grid 2 Kickstarter, for example. They asked for $1 million to fund a full sequel to the game, and I saw a lot of "How the heck can it cost $1 million to create a tower defense game??" Only after you run the numbers and think about it for a bit, you realize that $1 million can probably fund a company of 10 people working for average wages for a year. For a very highly polished game like the original Defense Grid, someone could easily understand how it could take 10 people working for a year to create that.
I wonder if it would be of help to some Kickstarter projects to be more transparent into where the money will go? If potential donors knew "This other game had X people working on it for Y months, and after costs of office space, legal expenses, and benefits, it costs us $Z to create", maybe it would make it easier to understand where they're coming from asking for a specific amount?
The more popular argument is of course that other Kickstarters ask for less. And, to be fair, if you launch a Kickstarter then you are competing against other Kickstarters. Maybe you really need $1,000,000, but if the other guys are asking for $200,000 or $50,000, it starts to look like you are greedy. Or out of touch. Or a company with ideals beyond your station. Or a company that should be looking at more traditional funding routes. You certainly aren't seen as a fan who wants to get a game out, but rather more likely as a business who, after seeing other success stories, is trying to jump onto the Kickstarter money train before it leaves the station.
(For Defense Grid 2 specifically, not only was it competing against other Kickstarters, it was competing against other Tower Defense games. That genre which the market has been flooded with for years, and for a while appeared to be one of the backbone of free Flash games. It was a sequel to a somewhat recently released game that didn't need Kickstarter. People only quirked their eyebrows harder when they were told that Defense Grid 2 was going with a high budget Kickstarter because the first Defense Grid didn't make money. And it certainly didn't help the court of public opinion when they saw the tiering system, and how the "goal" was only an expansion pack while the full sequel was a stretch goal.)
What turned me away was the fictional space and the aesthetic, which said: Mainstream.
There's a fantastic mechanic in there, wrapped up in a presentation space that feels very safe. This isn't a criticism. There's no problem with the space, and I love the blend of sci-fi espionage you have going on. But I've seen it, and done it, and don't really want to re-do it. It feels like big studio domain, and what has traditionally attracted me most to Kickstarter campaigns is the sense of something which is mechanically AND visually and emotionally risky (experimental, unique). You hit one target for me, but missed the other two.
Not that I want to imply that my feelings are indicative of some broad public opinion. In fact, I could very well be the only potential backer who felt this way. But I just wanted to offer you another point of view that you may not have considered, if it helps at all.
I do wish you the best of luck, and I'll almost certainly purchase the game because it looks phenomenal (I've seen so called triple-A games with less polish) and the main mechanic is brilliant.
Who would have thought that being too polished would be seen as a negative? Because certainly the opposite is true as well.
I guess you just need to communicate your idea clearly, demonstrate or prove that what you are promising can be done, and relate to the community in a more personal way.
Thanks again for sharing!
Interesting read, thank you for sharing and congrats!
Thank you in advance for your answer.
I'm really excited at the idea of "core" games on iOS, and I was crossing my fingers from day one. I'm super excited that you guys made it, and I can't wait to see the fruits of your labor. Wishing you guys a smooth development, I can't wait to see what you come up with!
I can understand why people would be put off by the "polished" look of the game. Personally, when I look at Kickstarter projects for games, I do not look for high profile names. Rather the opposite, I look for a small team with a cool idea, and not enough money, and for whom finding a publisher would be pretty hard to near impossible.
As for your game, you could have pitched it to any publisher, or any other kind of financial backing system and be rewarded with a pile of money, based on the sheer professionalism, and polish of your product, (not to mention the game projects that members of your team have worked on). This to me, (and this is my opinion here, but may also be shared by others) was what made me look at your kickstarter page, and your video, be interested, and yet not contribute to the campaign. I saw the product, and instantly I thought: "well this game will eventually see the light of day whether I contribute or not, there's no way that they wont be able to get financing in one way or another". Now, that might not be the best reaction, but I am sure that I am not the only one who thought and did so.
Anyway, that's it, I just wanted to shed some light as to what might be going through the minds of some of the visitors to your kickstarter page (or others like it), and hopefully help your team and others who will surely follow gain a bit of insight.
That being said, I wish you guys the best of luck on your project, and like most people, will be looking forward to seeing, and playing, the final product.
Cheers
Thank you for your reply, Ryan, and thank you again for mentioning us there in your update that time - I remember this too ;))
Good luck with your game!
I come from a core gaming background and still love them, but I can't see these "war on gaming" and "tablet supremacy = core games' death" theories as anything but irrational.
Anyways, I missed out on the Kickstarter (d'oh) but if you're still taking monies I'd love to chip in.
In the case of consoles, designing for consoles has certainly affected PC games. Where a couple of decades ago, PC games were the "best" and consoles had to get scaled down ports, now PC games are getting ports of console games, often with little to no improvements (and sometimes with added issues.) Publishers went to consoles because that is where they thought the money was (whether it actually was or not.)
That is why people get up in arms when a new PC game has a "Push Start Button" at the title screen. Or displays tutorial stuff with gamepad buttons, assuming you will be using a gamepad just because you've got one plugged in. When you go to the video options and see you've got only three or four basic things. When the PC version gets saddled with Games For Windows Live, because the publisher won't spend the money to create a new working network option. When Ubisoft does anything.
People expect similar to happen as iOS becomes more popular. The difference here is that PC versions of iOS games tend to be priced around 5-10x as much as their iOS counter-parts, even when they are nearly identical. So not only do you get a game made for a different environment (iOS games tend to be made for playing in shorter bursts, and for a different control scheme, for examples) and a weaker system, you get to pay much much more for it.
Personally, I will start watching a video and if it's good I'll click the link to go to the parent site (youtube or vimeo) to continue watching it in HD and read people's comments.
I have no idea if I'm the majority, but this could attribute some of those stats.