I liked its room transitions effect, so I shared the link around on forums other than this one. I find the art style to be interesting as well. The setting is an interesting hook. The project looks like it has a good direction. It was covered by Rock Paper Shotgun on November 19th. I was really surprised it was covered again on December 11th.
By the time the green TV room scene was playing I was waiting for the pitch video to end, then it improved when I saw the cans levitating. I can see less patient people not watching that far in. The pitch could have been much worse. I can't call it bad because it conveys the atmosphere and such, but it feels too lacking for me to praise it.
Here are graphs about the performance of To Azimuth's rewards:
http://i.imgur.com/8F5mCON.pngThe second Rock Paper Shotgun article appears to have been very effective at generating momentum with big y-axis gains. The $10 tier introduces a copy of the game and has 105 backers. Here is something interesting: the $15 tier has 361 backers (256 more). That up-selling there impressed me at first, but then the thought occurred that the $15 tier was so popular because following tiers (After the $25 tier) being too weak. There is a noticeable lack of medium (Above $30) and large (Above $100) sized pledges on this project. I see weak rewards as a huge factor for why it didn't succeed.
First, the average pledge per backer amount really stands out as a big potential indicator of a problem with up-selling backers to the larger reward tiers. With so many $15 pledges I would expect a campaign like this to be above $20 per backer. The final average was $21.01 per backer, but it had risen up from around $17. It should have been above $20 after the first 48 hours. If it was a project with a $5 copy of the game I could call those averages good.
Second, there were no reward tiers priced above $100 for the first 25 days of the campaign. Why is this bad? If a large reward tier doesn't exist to contain a large pledge, it is a disincentive for someone to make such a pledge. A lack of any backers over $100 can really harm the momentum a crowdfunding campaign needs to reach tipping points. A lack of large pledges can significantly lower the average pledge per backer amount. Even after the addition of 4 new large tiers there weren't any backers selecting them. The content of the large tiers isn't very appealing from my perspective.
Third, there is a jump from $25 to $50 with no reward tiers in-between. Why is this bad? There is a funding hotspot around $40 (And $100) for video game campaigns. It is not tapping into that hotspot, so it will have a harder time covering funding distances and also keep the average pledge amount lower. The graph for the number of backers at each reward tier shows a significant drop in the number of backers at the $50 tier then again for the $75 tier. From experience I do not like seeing a reward tier with less than a quarter of the number of backers of the previous tier. Doubling the price when jumping to the next tier is an easy way to cause less effective up-selling. In general, exceptions to the don't-double-the-reward-pricing-with-each-jump advice are for $1 tiers and the tiers priced above $100. Those exceptions are because of backers at those tiers often have different motivations for pledging. Again, there is a visual indication of a problem up-selling backers.
It missed its minimum goal by $5,647 and a reboot in 2015 would likely succeed. The last update hinted at a reboot and I hope they attempt one. If the rewards had been more efficient per backer it should have had a much easier time reaching its goal with the first attempt. The last quarter of the year is also a harsh time to run. They did manage to get greenlit for Steam which can be a big plus for a reboot.