Kickstarter is a very crowded place these days. For video games, the industry is in a tough spot, and traditional funding is quite difficult to procure. That means many games which I think historically would have partnered up with a publisher are now turning to crowdfunding. The competition is fierce and the quality bar for projects is extremely high. I wanted to share what I learned after raising $169,000 for our game.
Be Unique
This one may seem obvious, but I’m going to call it out anyways. Kickstarter is a place for new ideas. If your project is the same as other games that are already available, you will probably struggle to find an audience.
Build Trust
I don’t have hard data to back this, but I think video games are one of the riskiest projects on Kickstarter from a backer perspective. They take a very long time to make and a lot can happen between funding and delivery. Many big, successful campaigns never produced a game. Backers know this. You need to convince them that your project is trustworthy.
One part of this for us was showing all our names and faces. People are more likely to trust Chris Cunningham who puts his real info online than Hexadis (that guy is super shady). We also used this to show we have a team of people ready and able to continue working on the game.
If your game is going to be available on Steam, make sure your Steam page is live. This not only helps show the game is real, but you may also get people who don’t back on Kickstarter but do wishlist on Steam. We went one step further and also have a company website.
Make sure to communicate with your backers and potential backers! Answer their questions as quickly as possible. Welcome them to your community. The month before and during the campaign I spent a large portion of my time simply responding to people. Be ready to address criticisms or even false accusations in a positive manner.
The days of projects based purely on concept art or screen mockups have been gone for a long time. You need to show real gameplay clips in both a trailer and the body of your Kickstarter page. The trailer is crucial for generating both project interest and building trust. We’ve had 10,265 plays of the trailer on the Kickstarter page and 23.65% of those people watched to the very end. That maps very closely to the number of people who backed the campaign (2,524).
Kickstarter does not require video games to have a playable demo, but it will probably massively help your campaign. I can only guess here because we did not have a publicly available demo. Instead, we included alpha access as one of the tier rewards with a scheduled start set for a couple months after the campaign ended. The goal is to show people the game already exists in some fashion, even if it’s just a small part of it.
Kickstarter Support
We had one technical issue setting up our Kickstarter page which received prompt and helpful support. Outside of that issue, however, support mostly felt underwhelming. They do have some articles and info they post, but I wanted to talk to an actual human about a few things. I would have been happy to pay some sort of Kickstarter consulting fee but this is not a service they offer.
We applied for the “Project We Love” badge but didn’t get it. We never heard back from anyone on why we didn’t qualify. Maybe it was because we didn’t have a public demo available? I’m sure we lost some money because we didn’t have the tag, but you can still succeeded without it. I think it’s a multiplier, not a requirement.
Other Projects
The timing of your campaign matters. You don’t want to get completely overshadowed by huge projects. For example, our game had about 15,000 wishlists on Steam before the campaign started. There was another campaign which was starting near ours which had over 100,000 wishlists. Even though our games are different genres, I think it would have hurt our campaign to go live on the same day or week. Instead, because our campaigns were staggered, we were able to do some cross promotion and generate interest for both games.
Cross Promotions
In my experience, most of the teams running Kickstarter campaigns are incredibly friendly. Don’t be afraid to reach out to other teams and ask if they are interested in cross promotions. You may even be able to share some advice and info with each other. It felt less like we were competition and more like we were all rooting for each other.
Pricing
The price of your reward tiers can absolutely make or break your campaign. My best advice here is to look at recent successful campaigns that are as close to your game as possible (genre, scope and quality). That’s a good starting point, but ideally you’ve managed to gather some interested people before the campaign goes live. Get their input. Ask them what they think of your planned reward tiers and make changes where appropriate.
Marketing
The chances of a successful campaign without marketing are very low. You can, however, take a bunch of different approaches to this. The two biggest techniques I see are free social media posts or paid ads. Either way, you need to market your campaign and get the word out. The Kickstarter platform is a multiplier here. They will show the big successful projects to more people. You should not rely on it solely.
The marketing before a Kickstarter campaign is maybe more important than the marketing during a campaign. A huge successful day one will massively impact the entire rest of the campaign. You can also use the pre-campaign marketing to get a feel for whether or not your project will be successful.
We used ads on Facebook, Instagram and Reddit to promote the game. If you are spending $100 a day and only getting 10 followers or 10 email sign-ups, maybe that’s a problem. It could be you only need to update your marketing material, but it may also be a sign that the interest isn’t there.
For our marketing, we started by gathering emails and building out a mailing list. We ultimately decided to send people directly to Kickstarter instead and I would do this from the start if I did another campaign. We had a conversion rate of 20% of our Kickstarter pre-launch followers that backed the project.
Marketing Partners
Knowing how important marketing was, we wanted to work with an experienced partner. We reached out to some of the bigger names like BackerKit and Backercamp. They both expressed some interest, but said they wouldn’t work with the project until after we had shown an initial successful start to the campaign. From my perspective, if we were able to have a good start without their help, it felt like they wouldn’t be adding too much that we couldn’t do on our own.
If you are going to partner with a marketing firm or specialist, make sure they know your type of project. A company that does a ton of tech gear probably isn’t the best fit for a video game. Also make sure you know the average performance of their projects and not just the results of their best performers. Finding the right partner was painful but worth it.
What Would I Change
This one is hard, because in the end I’m pretty happy with how the campaign went. It wasn’t perfect, and there were some lessons learned along the way, but I think that’s unavoidable for a first time project. The one area I’m really unsure of is that we didn’t do any early bird tiers. Did we lose money from people who were only looking to get the game at a great price or did we make more money by not selling at a discount? I do not know.