Crowfall had excellent pre-launch marketing build up. The
graphs for Crowfall shows overperformance in the $200 to $500 range (The early-birds were attractive). The project creator account has backed over 80 campaigns. There are many tiny details that show a lot of experience about how Kickstarter campaigns work that newcomers may not recognize.
I am waiting to see how well a
March 10th launch of a new Kickstarter campaign from
Eric "Wingman" Peterson goes.
So far with GDC (And soon PAX) this week was a very bad time to launch or end a small Kickstarter campaign. A lot of small campaigns that were struggling experienced zero new backers yesterday. The next period of 2015 that should be this bad is around E3 in June.
Kickstarter's popularity ranking is based on the number of recent new backers. It is not based on pledge amounts. A $1 backer contributes as much to the ranking calculation as a $10 backer. This is why some campaigns are now being suspended after being caught cheating up their visibility through tens of $1 pledges from farmed accounts. A project with 20 new backers that day should find itself ranked higher than a campaign with 18 new backers. I do not know how ties are decided.
Those staff-pick badges are added to the project thumbnails manually by the project creator. Those projects do get to appear under the Staff Picks filter. They do not gain an artificial advantage in the normal popularity rankings. It was possible for staff (At least back in 2012) to flag campaigns to be buried and not appear in search results. I was a backer on Tentacle Bento that was flagged because of accusations of rape in that game. Patchman was not flagged. It is still listed normally.
Graphs for Don't Be Patchman show that while it covered a lot of funding distance early, it is actually not getting many small backers at the $10 and $15 tiers where it matters the most. The number of recent new backers decides its popularity ranking. These introductory rewards tiers function like a canary in a coal mine. If their growth slows then even though some larger pledges are currently still happening, it will eventually stall out if nothing is done. It had no net new backers on March 4th.
The average pledge per backer should be a bit above $20CAD for that project. It is currently at $72.59CAD which indicates a lack of the smaller backers. I've gone over the project page twice. I still do not know what the nuts-and-bolts of the gameplay are. An alternate way to describe this is that I do not see what the
core gameplay loop is. Is it farming, then the office. Is the office space only an opening level that isn't returned to? Is there an overworld to navigate with a city and forest areas? Is it persistent, or is it like an RTS game where the economy/farming starts from scratch again with a new scenario? This confusion is the big obstacle I see for experienced backers pledging to this project. There are some very good looking components and overall presentation, but I don't know how they mesh together into a game. I can have brainstormed ideas for how they mesh, but these may be vastly different from the game actually being made.
I then looked at the Greenlight page and more of this missing information was found there, but still not enough. The game needs a very easy to understand elevator pitch like "
Metal Gear Solid meets Harvest Moon" and that pitch needs to be presented immediately when a visitor arrives. Right now it is complicated and even though I've looked over hundreds of projects I don't know what this one is exactly trying to be. The world is pitched well. The gameplay needs to be pitched more. The rewards structure is on the scale of acceptable to good. I think the pitch is the big problem keeping it from getting backers and more coverage. Even the coverage it did get like Cliqist and GamingOnLinux don't go into the gameplay. Some games like Five Nights At Freddy's are easier to understand by watching than reading a paragraph. Interesting games can be buried under communication barriers.
Here is a way to think towards a solution. Valve's Portal game in this situation would start by explaining the mouse controls for the grab, blue portal and orange portal, then demonstrate some companion cubes in an infinitely falling loop and then being shot horizontally when a new portal is created. I can see the farming part and sticking fruit onto drones in Patchman's gameplay, but the more TheSims-like parts feel under-explained. I don't know if the office space uses a different mode. I assume coloured polygonal shapes are information being transferred, but I don't know the meaning behind each shape. With enough information, the players should be able to imagine playing the game before even having access. The Let's Play video format can help with conveying a lot of the information needed for this.
I maintain Kickstarter-related forum threads on places like Pixelscopic and Infinitap's forums. Most projects get two sentences for me to describe them. If I had to make a post including Don't Be Patchman I would be struggling to decide how to summarize it. I could say "It has some good pixel art and a great sense of energy in the video" but that isn't actually describing the "Play" part of "Gameplay".
Project creators should be recording the changes in the number of pitch views in the creator dashboard. That number can indicate if a campaign is buried, not converting many visitors into backers or both. It could have taken about 2,000 to 4,000 views to have achieved that much progress. The
Bitly Analytics currently shows 73 shortlink clicks for Patchman.
The
graphs for STRAFE show many indicators of problems with the up-selling in the rewards. It is really concentrated with backers stuck in the lower priced end of the rewards structure. Even before looking at the reward text, the $45 tier being capped creates a big hole between the $25 and $50 tiers that prevents many backers from raising their pledges. Because the campaign was able to eventually brute force itself across 100% funded, even with severe problems with the rewards, may be due to almost every other aspect of the campaign's execution looking well done.
I was watching STRAFE closely on
February 1st because so few campaigns survived after slashing the price for the reward tier that introduces a copy of the game. I was impressed how the $15 tier's cannibalization of the $25 tier was not as bad as it could have been. I've seen campaigns implode where almost all positive momentum was neutralized by existing backers downgrading. This may be due to the soundtrack. The $25 tier had the soundtrack while the later $15 tier did not have the soundtrack. If the inserted $15 tier included all the content from the $25 tier, the campaign may have doomed itself to cannibalization because there would be less incentive to stay at the $25 tier. Luckily this did not sink the campaign.
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