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[Danny Hayes]

Hey guys,

I've kinda noticed kickstarters being featured less and less in gaming press as time goes on, as well as less and less quality projects being listed on the site. I mean hell, at the time of posting this, there's like, 5 projects that have garnered enough interest to get more than $10,000 out of 364 live projects.

What's on kickstarter now...

Is kickstarter starting to die for games? Is it still worth doing? Some of you may have seen that I ran a kickstarter myself some months ago for my game PONCHO, but we only got like, 38% of the funding we needed. Even though we had some trailers, badgered press, took the game to shows, etc, the gaming press pretty much ignored us. Kickstarter themselves almost never post games in their little "things we backed" emails. Here's a link to our postmortem on running the campaign:

POSTMORTEM

Since getting noticed by the press or already being an established indie is what's required to be successful now, and the press see kickstarters as a no go zone, is kickstarter gonna be dead for us soon? If it isn't already?

PONCHO DEV LOG & LINK TO FAILED KICKSTARTER

[Boreal]

I think it's that people are starting to count up how many failed/half-assed projects are coming out of it and becoming a LOT more skeptical.

Patreon looks like it's coming up as the next "big thing" as far as this stuff is concerned.  I think it's the fact that you're able to spend as much or as little as you like and it's easy to pull out or more accurately judge what you're getting before you pay.

[Mittens]

This discussion is kinda already going on just here;
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=44739.0

[LobsterSundew]

Hey guys,

I've kinda noticed kickstarters being featured less and less in gaming press as time goes on, as well as less and less quality projects being listed on the site. I mean hell, at the time of posting this, there's like, 5 projects that have garnered enough interest to get more than $10,000 out of 364 live projects.

What's on kickstarter now...

At 02:50am PST for January 14th I currently see 119 live campaigns in the Video Games category. You may have different search filters toggled.

Currently the top 4 ranked active campaigns are Shadowrun: Hong Kong at $315208, Into The Stars at $81124, Drift Stage at $36222 and NF Magazine at $25920. There are others that raised more but are in their slowdown periods like The Grisaia Trilogy at $370093. Some newcomers like Identity at $40148 are starting to enter their slowdown period and dropping in the rankings.

Every year since 2011 the press for games on Kickstarter dries up going into November and won't fully recover until February. There has been a general decline in the small and medium sized projects getting covered. If a campaign is very uncertain to make its goal, then there is usually very little coverage. When some of the crowdfunding focussed blog columns like Kickstarter Katchup stopped posting it hurt the small projects. Only this week of January did Kickstarter start getting back to normal as was expected based on past years.

Kickstarter is still very viable. It just didn't reach optimistic targets for 2014. Execution of campaigns is much less forgiving for many reasons discussed in the thread Mittens linked. I also see some of the smaller types of campaigns (Like a small $3 priced game) edging towards extinction because they can't compete against the advantages that a $15 priced game can have. I've found it very interesting that many people in that thread held the perspective that Kickstarter is both saturated and that being saturated is bad for their chances of being funded. There are low points in the annual cycle like the past five weeks when Kickstarter is far from saturated, but the external press environment is so poor. This can also happen in summer. Kickstarter addicts can be bored waiting for any interesting campaign to launch. Last November and the launch of Kickstarter UK were times when the platform was crammed full of too many projects. September can also be a month when the largest campaigns come out in full force. What I observe is that the presence of many good quality campaigns at once actually helps campaigns, while a lack of other good campaigns can be harmful to the few good projects that did launch.


The trailer for the pitch video, art assets, music, project thumbnail were not holding Poncho back from my perspective. Project updates were more about news and shout-outs instead of the more important objective of elaborating what the game is. It is a weak part of project, but not serious enough to sink this particular campaign. The "quality" or experience levels of backers was on the very high end. I see many Kickstarter regulars with hundreds of projects backed. To me this indicates Poncho was a very good fit with the indie gamers that frequent Kickstarter. It is an indicator the game itself is good. I remember being impressed by the scenes in the forest. It does suffer Fez comparisons. Presskits is a massive topic to cover. The project lacks enough of a hook about the story of its actual development. The presskit was weak because it loses in the battle of general vs specific points about a game. The world is much more impressive to me than the gameplay, yet the presskit prioritized the gameplay mechanic before the world. I would have done the reverse and focussed on the world, then the mechanics. It is not that the gameplay is weak. It is that the world outshines the gameplay for me. I can see how the current presskit could be easily dismissed by overworked bloggers. It was too ambitious with the write-up while not providing much for a blogger to easily discuss with his or her readers.

I looked at the graphs for Poncho first to make notes, then I go look at the reward text. Some details like the plateau at the £10 tier was because it was locked; I ignore that because it couldn't grow. Even before reading the reward text the graph looks abnormal in the £7 to £50 range. When I do read the text the rewards don't flow well at all. It looks like the rewards were significantly holding the campaign back by making it much less efficient per backer at covering funding distance. This to me looks like one of primary reasons the campaign failed, even greater than lack of press. With the backer numbers you were seeing the campaign could have been funded if the tiers were performing normally. By being so inefficient with the backers the campaign was receiving, it needed to aim for many more backers to tip towards getting funded.

There were too many £5 tier slots. It has become increasingly apparent from watching Kickstarter graphs that an early-bird that lasts into the middle of the campaign's run is like poison. It saps the backers from the following tiers. The £7 and £15 tiers both started to take off after the £5 tier filled up making the campaign a bit more efficient. It was too late by then. There is also the problem of a big pricing jump from £7 to £15 after the £10 tier was locked. Backers are very price sensitive in the lower priced rewards. Doubling in price from one reward to the next open one results in many backers not upgrading their pledges. This too added to the inefficiency per backer.

With more press and aiming for at least 270 additional backers, Poncho could have made it. It was closer to tipping towards success than you might think. At around 500 backers the press start to pay more attention to a small campaign. With a small funding gap, upgraded pledges from backers can help cover the missing amount but only if the rewards don't fight back with the flow. Poncho was close. It did slow down rapidly from the launch window, but it faired through the Kickstarter trough far better than many of its peers. It never was close to completely stalling out. It looks like the campaign was finally achieving the momentum it needed near the end, but ran out of time. It also missed the next wave of new campaigns by a few days. That would have significantly helped its last 48 hours because of the press being generated by the new launches. A reboot would have been an option since it achieved over 30% funded. With more effective rewards it could have been 50% to 80% of that funding goal with that many backers.

[Impmaster]

Holy shit this is the best researched post ever on tigsource.

[shinygerbil]

i was just going to post "lol yesterday shadowrun hit $100000 in 100 minutes, thousand dollar per minute, kickstart is ded "

real talk, i get worried by people who overanalyse kickstarter statistics like they're going extinct. I don't get why people make graphs, and notes about the graphs, and graphs from the notes, and use words like "trending"

[s0]

I think it's that people are starting to count up how many failed/half-assed projects are coming out of it and becoming a LOT more skeptical.

or like i said in the other thread, people are just realizing that kickstarter is a funding platform and not a "pay people to make your dream game for you"  platform

[Oskuro]

It is also possible that people are getting used to the concept of crowdfunding and, as such, it isn't as newsworthy as it used to be.

[Mittens]

I think it's that people are starting to count up how many failed/half-assed projects are coming out of it and becoming a LOT more skeptical.

or like i said in the other thread, people are just realizing that kickstarter is a funding platform and not a "pay people to make your dream game for you"  platform

Maybe one day people will learn you cant make an assault rifle with a desktop plastic extrusion 3d printer

[Danny Hayes]

Man LobsterSundew, that was some analysis!

Yeah I think plenty of what you say is true, for sure in regards to poncho I think we learned a great deal if we ever decide to do crowdfunding again at some point. The main thing that let us down was press attention, which as you say may have been better if we got more backers at the start.

Another thing that we can agree has hurt kickstarter is the whole "they don't actually have to make the thing and can just take your money" legal aspect of KS. *cough* "yogscast" *cough*. A lot of people messaged me saying they didn't want to pledge more because they'd been "burned" by kickstarter before. However it's worth noting that the terms and conditions of putting a project up changed a couple of months ago to rectify this, where backers can now sue if the project creator just cons them.

[Cobralad]

I think it got more to do with pixel-platformer genre oversaturation.
One of examples may be Vagante: game is good, but so is Dungeon Kids, that was funded, but is still in development.
There is 1999 greenlit projects on steam now, many of them good, many of them are known drags that wont see the light of day despite being funded.

[s0]

Another thing that we can agree has hurt kickstarter is the whole "they don't actually have to make the thing and can just take your money" legal aspect of KS. *cough* "yogscast" *cough*. A lot of people messaged me saying they didn't want to pledge more because they'd been "burned" by kickstarter before. However it's worth noting that the terms and conditions of putting a project up changed a couple of months ago to rectify this, where backers can now sue if the project creator just cons them.

tbh people who fund overambitious projects by ppl with no experience just because they look cool only have themselves to blame.

or, for the 3rd time, kickstarter is a funding platform and ppl need to realize that backing a videogame kickstarter is not the same as preordering a game. i mean it's partly the devs' fault that people think of kickstarter as a store, because so many of them DO use it as a glorified pay what you want preorder thing.

[LobsterSundew]

Holy shit this is the best researched post ever on tigsource.

Man LobsterSundew, that was some analysis!

Thanks.

I don't get why people make graphs, and notes about the graphs, and graphs from the notes, and use words like "trending"

If done properly it is a powerful means of being able to discover stories about association and causation leading to greater understanding of what happened in the past. It is also important to actually take objective measurements instead of always relying on the subjective. A comparison can be made to profiling how code runs to find bottlenecks instead of wasting effort on premature optimization on something that won't be a bottleneck. There are also dangers in that poor methods for collecting and handling data can result in poor recommendations. It is also possible to move away from reality by being too buried in the data and not using common sense. The

is a story of why statistics should not be blindly accepted. I have disagreed with many conclusions about what is common advice for the proper length for a campaign because I have a different perspective of daily numbers per tier instead of how others can only track the overall net changes in the number of backers and amount pledged and sometimes only have access to the final numbers for the tiers of a campaign. It is not the 30 day length driving success, but that a 30 day length fits within various platform traffic and blogger cycles better. It has also become tradition to run 30 days because the campaign can fit within a month. Running for 30 days while launching in the middle of the month can result in different challenges from launching at the start of a month. Adding one or two days could result in much better final 48 hour surges if it aligns better with blogger's schedules. Because statistics influence decision making it is good practice to question the validity of the conclusions draw from statistics. What often happens in the press is people who don't understand full statistics misrepresent the conclusions or that even worse is some organizations will massage the data in their favour.

One way I sort campaigns in into price groups or weightclasses. I do not say lightly that some of the smallest campaigns (Games prices $1 to $7) are going extinct (Stalling out and not reaching their goals). They can still appear, but they die out so quickly. I am shocked by how poorly the games priced below $10 do on Kickstarter. Even adjusting for the number of appearances a small $5 priced game can struggle through the entire run to try to not completely stall out and get buried in the rankings. A $15 backer covers as much distance as three $5 backers. This already makes a $5 priced game much more inefficient per backer at covering funding distances than a $15 priced game. It makes a larger goal much harder to reach than you might realize because your perspective can be how small that goal is for another campaign to reach. Sometimes $5 games are asking for as much budget as $10 and $15 games are with their projects. The mobile iOS game projects really suffer from their low price point. The flow of their rewards also starts up-selling from a lower price point. A backer has to go through more tiers to upgrade to the same level as they might select on the campaign for a $15 priced game. Because small games can be less impressive even in its presentation, it can struggle more against the apathy of backers and press. Attractive physical rewards are harder to budget. Then there are stigmas such as consumers being tired of cheap looking 8-bit pixel art. Even a low price has become a stigma. The project could have a single team member meaning more stress to do marketing and respond to messages on a single person. A proper marketing budget can be more than what the entire campaign is asking for. If the minimum goal goes very low like $500 then it still may not help because some potential backers see it as unfair and that the project creator should just get a job. It is like watching a species that no longer can survive in that environment. I've been searching for ways that they could try to adapt.


Vagante ran during the later half of August 2014. While other categories on Kickstarter can do well in this period, I've been recommending against running a campaign here unless a project really has to. There is often an abundance of very poor campaigns and a lack of good quality campaigns. Gaming college students can be moving or preparing for their next semester in other ways. September is when some of the biggest campaigns of the year waited to launch, so competition can then rise during the trough period of a campaign from August.

The per backers average is a healthy $28.02 (For a $15 tier introducing the game it is good to aim for a $20 to $31 average per backer). It would have needed to be targeting around an additional 800 to 900 backers to reach 100% funded. It did raise enough to warrant a reboot.

The graphs for Vagante shows that there was not much of a surge at all in the last week. The daily number of backers in the Kicktraq graph was low for a last 48 hours period. This can be an indicator of backer and project creator morale problems. The rounding shape to the bar charts (Resulting for less and less y-axis gains) for the $15 tier is a strong indicator that the campaign was gradually losing momentum in the slowdown period. Other campaigns will have a S-shape where momentum begins to pick up again during the last week. After the dark green bars for September 5th the campaign struggles to regain double digits for new backers per day. The comments per day graph also sees no comments on September 5th. That day was a Friday. Friday, Saturdays and Sundays are generally the worst performing days of the week for new backer numbers. Friday August 29th also saw the dip to single digits in the weekend. Because Vagante's performance was dropping on weekends this can be a warning that the campaign is relying too heavily on getting backers from within Kickstarter. Another way of phrasing this is that when a project is not doing well with exposure outside of Kickstarter, when traffic to Kickstarter weakens its campaign also weakens. Monday August 26th saw another dip, which may be a result of the launch of fresh projects for that week forcing Vagante's visibility down in the project rankings temporarily. The daily comment numbers also dipped to zero there. There was Gamescom and PAX hype and reviews to compete against back then. August 29th had big showings at PAX, so that too may explain why the numbers dipped so much there.

The $30 closed-beta tier's performance was great looking at first. Another note is that the $25 digital artbook tier before it was not performing well. In the $15 to $100 range, the following tier being less than a fourth of the number of backers can be an indicator of a problem with the flow of the reward content. The drop down to the $20 tier is just acceptable to me because variation due to chance should be considered, but it was close to being unacceptable performance. The $25 tier was added 4 days into the campaign so it was not like the $25 tier had fewer backers because it was added near the deadline. One explanation is that the $30 beta access was so attractive that it was successful in pulling backers up. Another explanation is that backers who would of pledged above $30 were being funnelled down to the $30 tier. There is a $20 price jump from the $30 tier to the $50 tier. That is not too extreme of a price jump, but it is big enough to warrant inserting a tier between the two. I then see that the tier was restricted to U.S. backers only. It is easy to see 25% of backers can be international. Looking at all the higher priced tiers, they too were restricted to U.S. backers only. There was not much of a turnout in the highest priced reward tiers. The solution would have been having a digital-only large priced reward for international backers to select. There are different models for how to link tiers together. Vagante was using the rarer "All higher rewards include this" which can be superior to the "And all of the above" model in situations where reward content branches such as two tiers with the same price. It did not use that model to create branches for non-U.S. backers.

There were 6 project updates during the campaign. They were short and weak news updates from what I skimmed. Bitly Analytics (I recommend zooming in with your browser to see the details more) shows that the project shortlink was not being shared much after the first week. There were more than 10 Reddit submissions and even its own subreddit. It was impressive to see a burst of over 1,000 shares of the project link on the first day. Some people had bad impressions of the procedural generation in the demo. Characters with all those movement abilities could end up crammed into tight areas. There were many people that enjoyed the demo. Procedural generation has heavy pros and cons. I'd say that managing its existing backers was the weakest part of the campaign and what contributed more than the problems with the rewards to dragging the momentum down. If a game is too similar to many other new games on the market, that too can reduce the morale of backers. Because the game is not incredibly unique they have less incentive to rally for it to make its goal. I do see poor timing as potentially being more of a problem for the campaign since conventions distract bloggers with more profitable material for them than Kickstarter coverage.

[Moth]

LobsterSundew for tigs MVP 2015

Your insight is incredible, thank you so much for making these amazing posts.

[shinygerbil]

Haha I have to say, that was genuinely interesting.

I understand that stats are cool in general , I studied them a little and enjoy a good (correctly-used) statistic as much as the next person, I just can't muster the enthusiasm to apply them to Kickstarter. People do seem to obsess over it.

[Boreal]

I agree with the observation that most people are now starting to judge a high price as a quality - it's something I've noticed for a while.  It's stupid but then again look at the iPhone.  You can have something that does everything an iOS device can do for only a couple hundred bucks but people look at that and say "huh, if it's cheap it must be bad because why would anyone sell anything good for a low price?"

Things like Greenlight, Kickstarter, and Patreon are good marketing, not just funding and selling.

[Superb Joe]

i deserve free money

[EdFarage]

i deserve free money

Lobster Sundew posts are brilliant, thanks for those dude

[MrBones]

Holy shit, I don't think I've ever seen a post that informed in my entire life.

LobsterSundew for tigs MVP 2015

[DavidCaruso]

LobsterSundew for tigs MVP 2015

For real. Memes and jokes are cool, but this is the kind of stuff that really belongs in that "epic posts" thread. He's been giving me an incredible amount of help planning my KS campaign for Steel Assault too.