As part of a new Gamasutra feature on crowdfunding, Robert Boyd (Zeboyd Games, Cthulhu Saves the World) explains how his company blasted through its funding goal on Kickstarter.
Boyd revealed to Gamasutra that initial funding goal to port Cthulhu to PC was $3,000, but in just two days the project managed to surpass the $2,500 plateau. And after a little over two weeks that number more than doubled, with over $5,300 raised.
"I thought $3,000 raised over a month was pretty ambitious on our part," Boyd said. "I had no idea that we would end up raising that amount in just a handful of days."
While internet fandom of the Cthulhu character helped garner support, the company's track record with the original Xbox Live Indie Games version of the title, as well as Breath of Death VII no doubt helped.
"You really need to prove to people that you're worth taking a chance on and not just another wannabe game developer that isn't going to actually finish anything," said Boyd. "A good reputation from past projects helps immensely, but even if it's your first game, you can still make an impressive trailer and garner support that way."
To read more about developers' experiences with Kickstarter, as well as upstart game-oriented crowdfunding site 8-Bit Funding, read the full feature -- The Crowdfunding Revolution: Perspectives -- live now on Gamasutra.
It's definitely much easier if you already have a lot of traffic. Trying to launch my game Luminesca now on IndieGoGo (same principle as Kickstarter but it supports non-US projects) and I'm finding the hardest thing is just getting people to look at the damn thing.
$3000 over a month? That's kind of dwarfed by the indie game No Time To Explain which reached its goal of $7000 in *one day* on kickstarter. Its funding doubled over the next few days.
Hey! I'd hate to come off as a jerk or something, but we're two internet guys and we just kickstarted $7,000 for a game in about 8 hours. It came from a free Flash game I made in a couple weeks, a youtube trailer which was literally just gameplay footage, we posted on Reddit, we got a twitter account, made a website (Wordpress blog), Facebook, we took a while to build some interest before the Kickstarter. Then we offered the game for half-price on there, but we balanced it out by coming up with interesting ideas for other pledges. We're spending the money on finding talented people, and hopefully getting even more exposure.
I think the web game and posting the Youtube trailer on Reddit were the most effective things we did for exposure. Being a comedy game helps!
EDIT-- I wasn't gonna mention what the game was or anything, I didn't notice the guy above, sorry :/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1296948465/no-time-to-explain-indie-game
I think the web game and posting the Youtube trailer on Reddit were the most effective things we did for exposure. Being a comedy game helps!
EDIT-- I wasn't gonna mention what the game was or anything, I didn't notice the guy above, sorry :/