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[The Great Emoticon]

I have been talking with many indies lately about Kickstarter and how to best get funded. Best practices and tips for hitting your goal. One of the most common questions that comes up is if doing a Kickstarter is even worth it anymore.

With the amount of games constantly churning through the Kickstarter engine is it even realistic to think that your game can get funded or even noticed.

Has crowd funding changed? I understand its a combination of game quality, how much your asking for and how enticing your rewards are but even if you get all of those right is it still a realistic way of funding your game?

[oodavid]

It's like all finding avenues, if you are lucky enough and talented enough, you might get some of that mad dolla

[joe_eyemobi]

I think the honeymoon stage is definitely over with backers.  They are definitely more aware now of the risks of game development which are quite high.  However it is still possible to have a successful kickstarter, but you'll have to make sure everything about the campaign is totally polished.

[shellbot]

I think the honeymoon stage is definitely over with backers.  They are definitely more aware now of the risks of game development which are quite high.  However it is still possible to have a successful kickstarter, but you'll have to make sure everything about the campaign is totally polished.

This is what I believe as well.

Kickstarter is not as huge as it was last year (or two years ago), but it is still a viable option if your project is polished. The reason is pretty simple; expectations trumped reality. Certain groups/people were being funded 100's of times over because they were highly credible - ex: Double Fine, Project Phoenix, Mighty No. 9. These amount of money given to these projects generated buzz all throughout the gaming community; this garnered attention caused more people pledge, and more people to start kickstarter funds; but this eventually caused kickstarter to hit a breaking point.

Although some projects were funded and completed in the time frame they promised, others were funded and took longer than expected to complete; or even worse, abandoned. As the amount of completed projects severely outnumbered funded projects and was dwarfed by the amount of newly pledging projects, backers became more apprehensive to pledge. Less people were donating to projects because they were not seeing the completed projects, and less people were making new kickstarters because they were seeing more and more failed campaigns.

Now the only projects that get funded are already extremely polished or they are headed by an all-star cast. Kickstarter isn't dead, but it is no where near as active or beginner friendly as it once was; if you want to pledge: you had better have a VERY promising project and realistic goal.


TL;DR - Too many people asked too much and delivered too little. But you can still make money if your project looks good.



Also please excuse grammar and spelling mistakes. Last post before bed

[knifeySpoonie]

I think it's like anything.. It will be cyclical

There was a lot of buzz, with project after project smashing records and driving the marketing for even smaller games forward just because everyone was seeing KS in the news. But now there's a waiting game... with a lot of early backers wanting to see if their money has been well spent.

This causes people to be a little more strict with what they back.

However, I still think good projects that are well run can get funding. And I have backed some really cool projects in the last year.

As some of the bigger projects arrive next year.. and hopefully people are happy and excited at what they receive... the amount of projects getting ok'd will gradually climb again and we'll get the upswing..

But still whatever happens.. Well managed, exciting projects will get funded more often than not in my opinion..

[pelle]

Same as the app stores and everywhere else: At first it was easy to get attention and money, but now you need something good to show.  It has been a few sad years really when people throw up a devlog, post a few nice images, then immediately go on kickstarter hoping to get rich, I don't see anything bad at all if that thing is going away.

[knifeySpoonie]

Same as the app stores and everywhere else: At first it was easy to get attention and money, but now you need something good to show.  It has been a few sad years really when people throw up a devlog, post a few nice images, then immediately go on kickstarter hoping to get rich, I don't see anything bad at all if that thing is going away.

Ha.. I'm not sure thats what goes through many devs heads when they think about doing a Kickstarter... Also even £50k after taxes and fees and other costs for making a game, when split between 2 people isn't even a good salary... it gives you enough to survive and make your game in most cases...

Most do Kickstarter because it allows them to attempt to make the game they want to make. Free of publishers or investor influence, with a reasonable timeline etc... Some people don't have the resources to spend 3 years on a side project before going to Kickstarter, they have time to make a prototype and a solid proof of concept, before looking for funding.. And quite frankly if you can sell an idea to people and get them on board, why the hell not, People shouldn't have to be starving artists cause they want to work in a creative industry. Ks is one of the best things that has happened to gaming in a long time.

[invicticide]

I'm feeling more and more skeptical about it, which sucks since I was also planning to use it soon.

I don't think the problem is oversaturation, though. I think the problem is too many high-profile failures, broken promises, and endless delays. I've backed something like 13 games on Kickstarter over the last two years, and not one of them has delivered a final build yet. Several have basically dropped off the map: I haven't seen a backer update in months.

I feel like it's more important than ever to signal quality and reliability. Just having a cool idea and some nice art aren't going to cut it any more, I'm afraid.

[RudyTheDev]

First of all, KS is not dead -- that's just silly. Crowd-funding rate far exceeds any conventional funding avenues (I mean 35%, are you kidding me?). It's just not as ridiculous as its early adoption.

By now, more than a few of the funded projects have not delivered. This is not what consumers expect. Consumers expect product always and on time. They are not investors with risk management and realistic expectations. Consumers won't fund (exaggeration) anything else if they get screwed once. You can't convince people easily anymore, you essentially need a PR campaign.

No, Kickstarter isn't dead, it just isn't "magical" anymore. It's mainstream and comes with the usual baggage (read: 300 years of accumulated knowledge of selling people products they don't want, then convincing delays were worth waiting for and subpar product is just a stepping stone to the next gen iPho.. what were we talking about?).

[BishopGames]

Kickstarter is far from dead, but it is harder to succeed now that the ''golden days'' are over.

You have several things to take into consideration before launching your Kickstarter.
- Is your goal realistic? Let's say you could probably reach 30k but set your goal at 60k, well then you overestimated your goal. You have to look at the hype/traffic generated by your project BEFORE the Kickstarter. How many people follow the development? Who can you contact once it is launched to generate even more hype? Try to ''ride a wave'': you went to PAX, had a blast and the feedback was amazing, you met journalists, etc, well now is the time to launch your Kickstarter.
- The time of the year. As an indie, it is important to take advantage of the calm moments of the year. Don't try to compete with all the triple A's when they release their yearly title, you will most def. lose. Also some months (after Christmas) are proven to be terrible months for retails and sales in general, I'd avoid January and early February.
- Give more than what you ask. Kickstarter is all about selling a dream, your dream. But it's simply not good enough nowadays. You have to give alot to the backers, and also give to the people who simply press 'click' on your page/video. Make them laugh with your video. Give them a free wallpaper, anything really, but give them something before you ask them to pledge for your project.
-Deliver once it is funded. I cannot stress this enough. This is why the public is now more skeptical towards Kickstarters. How many games got funded (sometimes 2x,3x,5x more than the initial goal), only to fall into oblivion and not deliver? Well, this is the reason why we now have to work harder and gain back the trust of the public. If you are funded, you have to deliver. Absolutely have to.

This is, obviously, only my opinion but I feel these things have to be taken into consideration before you launch your page. Good luck!

[Mittens]

I don't see much get kickstarted these days.
I see projects pop up that would have easily met their goals in the early days, except these days they don't even get half of what they are asking for.
Thing is saturated with too many projects, visibility too difficult
Customer trust has been destroyed
Life is hard

[Catghost]

you really do need to build up your following outside of kickstarter before launching. everyone is trying to jump on the hype wagon, and in the process projects with potential get overlooked next to all of the junk.

[Zogthor]

Kickstarter is still a viable option for getting funds for your game, it simply calls for a higher bar being set for your project. Number one thing you'll need is a solid, attainable goal with an awesome idea. Number two is marketing.

There are many projects that people claim "should have gotten funded" but often times it's easy to see why they don't, and even the developer's will comment on this through their postmortem. They didn't get enough press. They launched right when [instert AAA title here] was releasing. They had a story but weak gameplay. They had gameplay, but weak story. They had art, but no demo. They used a 15 min video of just talking about the game instead of showing it.

The list is long in what you need to maximize that chance of your Kickstarter being successful and too often people rush into it without the prep work. And the backers can almost always tell.

[LobsterSundew]

It has become more difficult for some types of campaigns to get funded in 2014 and the video games category did not meet previous projections about pledges. I've been following Kickstarter very closely since May 2011 and helped run campaigns since 2012. Compared to what it was like back in 2011 Kickstarter is very far from "dead". I could describe it as a change in the meta game that an online TCG can experience as some strategies get nerfed. I see projects that aren't as fit for the current environment often stalling out after the first week. Those that I see as fit still do well on Kickstarter. Something to note is that it is not new that more than half of the projects in the video games category don't get funded.

There is a very noticeable lack of the big superstar campaigns in 2014. These helped drive the category's numbers in 2012 and 2013. They generate press which brings people to the platform and other projects also benefit from that traffic. They are a key part of the ecosystem. It can be compared to how history has shown that video game console needs to have a strong library of games to thrive. Kickstarter needs these projects to get a lot of traffic.

Even before the big December 2nd redesign of Kickstarter itself, it was changed to display the top 20 projects in popularity and require a button click to load more projects instead of scrolling. New projects will often bump down older projects if a campaign isn't doing well enough to defend its popularity ranking. I do see the new "By magic" sorting algorithm being a good thing for small projects to try to compete in their first 48 hours. In June of this year a new automated approval system was implemented which allowed overall quality to decline. Blog columns like Kickstarter Katchup are no more. That was a big change because now projects have to individual fight more for press coverage instead of being covered in the waves they launched in. Some YouTube channels like TotalBiscuit and Northernlion that used to drive a lot of traffic to indie game projects have now decided to stop covering individual Kickstarter projects.

An observation is there are now campaigns for games that were intended to try Kickstarter from their very beginning of their development. I've seen many dev job posting now mentioning the intent for the team to eventually run a crowdfunding campaign. I later saw the same teams' projects suffer from rushed execution and poor marketing. Many treat Kickstarter as a cash vending machine. These are also often first time developers with no fanbases built up. There is now a larger pool of indie developers that have tried and failed to get funded. A strategy for Kickstarter should not be to rely heavily on luck. Probabilities are something that good TCG players take into account (Compostion for rushdown decks to have good opening hand options, guidelines about when to wait before triggering special effects, board control to reduce the number of targets for RNG distributed attacks, etc.) and they try to increase the odds in their favor. One of the most solid strategies in preparing a Kickstarter campaign is having an estimate for how many backers overall will it take to reach 100%. A project needs about 20% of its pledges in the first week for things to go smoothly. If 30% is reached before halfway the odds tip in favor of success. A developer can focus on pre-launch marketing until there are enough followers for 20% to be reached. Rewards can be engineered to try to rush to 20% and try to cut some fat from the budget.

Here is an observation for 2014 I do worry about: I've seen projects that introduce the copy of the game at the $15 reward tier are now more common than those with the same tier at $10. Campaigns at $5 for the introductory tier have been moving closer to extinction. Back in 2012 the $10 campaigns were much more common than the $15 ones. This paragraph could quickly balloon into a whole essay about using reward pricing to compare campaigns as peers instead of minimum goal size. The smaller games are having trouble competing against the medium sized games. Large projects have always been hit or miss with their execution. It may be that the projects in the $30,000 to $70,000 minimum goal range become the dominant group best fit for crowdfunding. A lot of the large unsuccessful campaigns used as examples of "Kickstarter is dead" that I've seen did individually have serious issues holding them back.

There is also some recency bias in these "Kickstarter is dead" discussions. So far the last quarter of every year on Kickstarter is a horrible time to run a campaign. A bunch of ambitious and well-covered campaigns didn't reach their goals. There are annual, monthly, weekly and daily cycles in the past traffic data. November 2014 was worse than normal for various reasons like the press distractions from buggy AAA games, holidays and so many European-based projects cramming the platform. I compare it to November 2012 when so many UK-based projects rushed the platform at once. I still see launch announcements for next week from indie devs. December is the harshest month of all, so the chances of success for these games reaching large goals plummets. The platform doesn't start to fully recover until after the middle of January. The middle of August to the middle of September is also a bad time to run.

Kickstarter is now maturing. Backers and press have generally accumulated more experience about what projects to avoid. Projects that were just concept art could get funded back in 2012, but I don't see those same campaigns getting funded now. Gameplay footage and demos are now something potential backers want to see. Just being on Kickstarter is no longer a good enough reason for getting press coverage as it was back in 2011 and 2012. For some indie developers it means the standards to which they need to run their campaign have been raised. Kickstarter still has a huge marketshare partially thanks to the all-or-nothing funding model and it has built up a big community of backers. I do not see crowdfunding going away until it is no longer safe or profitable enough for indie devs to use.

[s0]

re: "customer trust has been broken": i think ppl are just waking up to the fact that you can't just pay someone to make your dream game for you. most of the early high profile KS projects* were/are never going to live up to the ridiculous expectations ppl had for them. there's a risk involved in funding and it's not a guarantee to get an amazing product. i think we might actually be on the way to developing a more healthy attitude towards crowdfunding at the moment.


*talking about the ones that weren't already in development and just needed an extra push like e.g. FTL and divinity original sin.

[FreelancerFile]

Kickstarter is no different to any other avenue where you try to get money from people, i'e people will back developers who have a successful track record, if you don't you better have a pretty amazing product to put in front of them, if you're game is not, if it's just "ok" I think it's very hard to get any traction on KS.

[eyeliner]

Not dead but saturated.

[Mittens]

re: "customer trust has been broken": i think ppl are just waking up to the fact that you can't just pay someone to make your dream game for you. most of the early high profile KS projects* were/are never going to live up to the ridiculous expectations ppl had for them. there's a risk involved in funding and it's not a guarantee to get an amazing product. i think we might actually be on the way to developing a more healthy attitude towards crowdfunding at the moment.


*talking about the ones that weren't already in development and just needed an extra push like e.g. FTL and divinity original sin.

Yeah, that's essentially what I was trying to say.

Not so much that as developers we have lost our credibility, more that we are no longer considered to have the unwavering game creation super powers backers expected in the first place.

[dez]

I ran a campaign.  It failed really badly.
In fact it could hardly have gone worse.
You can check out my game for yourself, but in my view I had everything going as far as quality, experience, and work already invested to succeed.

I am certain you can nit pick the campaign and find things that could have been done better or differently.

But I learned a couple of things that I will share, if anyone cares to read:
1) Do not use kickstarter to actually 'fund' your project.  I set my goal at 78k.  Don't tell me - it's too high right?  Well let me break it to you, by the time Kickstarter takes it's cut and taxes have rolled around the takeaway from 78k is less than 50k.  For me, that was the minimum I could accept to guarantee to keep my house, keep insurance for my wife and I, and make the game (which I calculated had about a year of work left).  A lot of successful projects I notice have teams of 4-8 people raising similar amounts or maybe even amounts like 150k.  Divide. It's obvious that those numbers are not a realistic amounts for a project, and I have been doing this long enough to know they are eating dirt even on success.  I tried to actually guarantee them the game by funding the project, and be honest with people.
THIS MEANS THAT YOUR CHOICES ARE:

• A) Lie to your backers and say you are capable of making a project even though you know your minimum is an insufficient amount
• B) Use kickstarter simply as a marketing tool (lie to your backers about your intentions)
• C) Risk not getting funded at all (me).

2) Have press ready to go on day one.  I had several magazines ready to print when I launched.  They did.  But it wasn't enough.  Without the support of someone big like Kotaku, Joystik, or PC gamer or something them will be very hard unless the amount you want to raise is very low (unrealistically - see point 1).

3) Luck.  I learned that skill is not enough. Your own investment is not enough. You simply have to be lucky.  I thought I had it made because I had seen so many projects that I thought were much worse than mine succeed, but that line of reasoning is rational, and customers are not rational (see: potato salad).  When I was already running the campaign was when I noticed how many other GREAT campaigns were failing.  
Again, a way to get out of this is to lie.  Some people do it by not saying much at all and just putting a flashy video. Some people end up funding the last bit of their own campaigns.  And some people do it unintentionally. I have been developing games for a long time, and I have worked with all kinds, I have seen several successful campaigns that -mark my words- have basically zero chance of completion.  They promise the world but I know that the people on some of those teams are incapable of delivering due to their lack of experience, and money raised (Look for campaigns that promise vast customization options, huge 3D worlds, multiplayer, TONS of rewards like t-shirts and expensive material items etc but the team has not shipped anything before.  Even with 400k they are toast. Think - 400k  wouldn't be nearly enough to get professionals to come in and help with such a big task (worse - minus kickstarter % and huge material costs), and they themselves are not suited to the task. It has a very high risk to fail.) They promise these things out of ignorance and succeed in their fundraising....

Hence running a Kickstarter is SO MUCH work, I am ambivalent as to whether it is worth it at all (even on success, because success must be so qualified to succeed).

I'll end with a quote:
"One must be a god to be able to tell successes from failures without making a mistake." ~Anton Chekhov

[richardatlas]

Thanks for the words of wisdom Dan. I've played Dan's game and know that it's awesome, and even saw the Kickstarter campaign and found it good as well. I think there's something to be said for having a community before running the campaign. For our project, we were hoping to start a Kickstarter next month, but I think we may hold off until we feel we've built a bit of a community or had some press coverage with early versions of the game.

The Kickstarter scene is probably saturated, but that doesn't mean you can't have success in it. You can't ask for money to pay your salaries because no one realizes that game developers need to eat or have homes. On the other hand you can justify almost anything else, and there are some great success stories of people without titles shipped who asked for pretty decent amounts (30-60k).

Eventually we'll be doing one and I'll let everyone know how it goes!