PAX South is over.
MAGFest was January 23rd to 26th and some of the big YouTube gaming personalities attended it. I had not known in advance about the
Witcher 3 events where members of the press could play the first 4 hours of that game. The last half of January has not been an easy time for a small project to get press.
The
new set of graphs shows
Steel Assault is now its Kickstarter trough period. It is dropping in the popularity rankings down to around the 25th rank. I had expected it to be 5 to 8 backers per day and not the 2 to 4 backers. It is not as bad as it first looks because the minimum goal is so small and the campaign is at 39% funded. Many campaigns also appear to spring back to life in the last week because of many factors, but mainly because of urgency that it will be ending soon.
The $10 tier continues to hover at around 40% of backers selecting it. The $20 tier being full means its percentage of the total number of backers should continue to decline throughout the remainder of the campaign. The percentages for the $15 and $25 tiers went up. January 29th shows $-39 in pledges because it looks like a $59 tier backer relocating to the $10 tier. The $59 tier has been seeing some fluctuation up and down.
The $25 and $39 tiers have stopped growing. The good news is that the $10 and $15 tiers continue to grow. If the $10 tier stops growing then it is an indicator the campaign will likely stall. That tier is starting to do better over the last 2 days.
I currently see 124 backers pledging $3,158. That is $25.47 per backer which is good. When the single $499 backer is removed the adjusted average pledge per backer drops to $21.62 which is also good. The target number of backers remaining to reach 100% using that adjusted average is an additional 224 backers (348 total). I see no need to cancel because that target number of backers is so small that it still has a good chance of achieving it. The best day so far was 30 backers on the first day. 7.5 days at 30 backers per day could get the campaign funded. It is not like the campaign needs to do 100 backers per day to reach a $200,000 goal.
SideKick shows a
94% probability of success. Kicktraq shows a
trend to $7,531 (94%) and Kickspy shows a
trend to $10,440 (131%). I feel that the campaign will get funded with a push in the last week.
Even at its current slow pace it has a very good chance of being able to achieve another $1,000 before the last 7 days of the campaign. I suggest starting to plan for how to cover 50% of the minimum funding goal in a period starting on Wednesday February 11th to Wednesday February 18th.
Steel Assault was able to raise $2,646 in its first 4 days. In that last week it would need to do $1,354 better than it did for its launch, which really is just 64 more backers. The conversion rate of pitch views into backers can be used to help estimate how many more views are needed, then specific blogs and YouTube channels that can satisfy those view numbers are targeted. 20,000 more views could be enough.
There was no coverage from the main blogs that cover indie gaming. I agree lack of exposure is the biggest problem I see for this campaign right now. There was a
post by IndieGames.com for the game, but not much else. On the positive side, it wasn't like the game received coverage from a big blog and resulted in few backers. The campaign could see a surge in backers when it finally does get covered by one of the big blogs.
Many bloggers allow for a single follow-up e-mail if they haven't responded to the first one that was sent. To send more e-mails can result in a developer being blocked as a spammer. Sending e-mails again to blogs like
Rock Paper Shotgun may have to be saved until the last quarter of the campaign or until there is a demo. Being close to the goal in both amount raised and time remaining can create some urgency to cover the project.
A Reddit push could be much more effective in the last quarter when there is more urgency to support the campaign. It would also be good to wait until there was a demo. Imgur itself is also a community with a voting and hashtag system. An example of an Imgur post is the
one for Battle Chef Brigade.
The project thumbnail could be experimented with to try to get more backers from within Kickstarter. I've mentioned before that there is more eye-catching imagery within the game than what is currently being used for the thumbnail. Changing the thumbnail may also get people who skimmed past the current thumbnail before in the discover area to finally give the project a click. It is possible to replace the project thumbnail before the deadline, so a new thumbnail could at least be temporarily tried.
The train is one of the more visually impressive parts of the gameplay that has been shown. The beam weapon fully deployed in the metro level could be a good screenshot to use as a background for the thumbnail. That beam weapon should still be visible even when the image is scaled down in size.
One thought for a quick modification is to have the current thumbnail, but beneath "Assault" that portion of the image would be pasted over with three screenshots in a single row that fills the width. It would cover the portion that is currently the protagonist and two vending machines. The screenshots do not have their borders touch; there could be some spacing in between each other and the edges of the thumbnail. The upper right corner could be useful for displaying a "Demo inside" badge.
I tried to think up of a better project description, but I didn't come up with anything better yet.
The first week of February 2015 is approaching. That is when big campaigns may have been waiting to launch, especially since January is known to be slow.
Part of this message relates back to when I talked about deciding what to concentrate efforts on.
Continuing to produce high quality updates may increase the chance of
Steel Assault receiving shout-outs from other projects and it provides material to impress bloggers. It also can help maintain backer morale, get some discussions going in the comments area and inspire them to share the campaign link with others.
Update #2 about the HUD and mechanics was excellent. Good work. Posting the next project update around February 2nd would be good to see if you wanted to maintain a weekly posting schedule. If it is taking a long time to prepare an update, consider reducing the scope of the update. Sometimes it is more important to make an update than it is to have a lot of content in that update. One of the best parts of update #2 was how each topic was shown with an animated GIF. Maintaining that level of production values for every project update may become too tiring.
Continuing to focus more on preparing a playable demo than marketing is what I think is still the best in the long-term, but the effort needed finish the demo is the obstacle to be concerned about. If it looks like it won't be done in time, look for ways to reduce the scope of what needs to be done. Some areas that are missing tiles could even use the virtual green holodeck-looking tiles as placeholders. Having a demo should make the marketing easier and open up the opportunity of Let's Players covering the game. That could help catch up for focussing less on marketing in the trough. The advice to stop worrying about external marketing for awhile and instead be concentrating almost all efforts on the demo (And another potentially smaller project update) can initially feel wrong because general Kickstarter advice is often to always be pushing hard for exposure, but it can make sense when there is very limited time resources and a demo itself could produce enough returns to get the campaign to 100%. A large campaign can't really afford to have to rebuild its momentum and exposure from scratch halfway through the campaign, but a small project can be able to rebuild enough momentum to reach a small goal. Another note is that the sooner the demo is finished the sooner the rebuilding of the momentum could start, but rushing the demo out too fast can risk bad impressions when it is obvious the demo should have had more polishing. The demo could be first be made available in a backers-only update so backers can bug test it or give urgent feedback, then the next version of the demo could be the one sent out to the public.
Community
