Impressions from entering Kikstarter

A few months ago, I published an article about texture mixing technology used in our commercial project. The other day this project came out on Kickstarter: Steam Squad .
In this article I want to share first impressions of crowdfunding, the legal aspects of working with Amazon, and, of course, advertise myself.

About Us

Probably the most substantive part of this article is a legal review, but before going on to it, I’ll tell you a little about us.
We are a development team from St. Petersburg. Three programmers, game designer and two artists - matheme, 239, academy. We have been making games for a little over a year and now we have two projects under development. Aethelings global strategy and turn-based tactical wargame Steam Squad. As for technology, we chose the Unity + Blender bundle and are very pleased with it (primarily because Unity is C #). Of the really interesting things in our studio is the Makerbot Replicator 2 3D printer, as we, like many, think that the 3D printing technology is very promising. Now we print on it figures of characters from our games. If there are questions, we will be happy to state our plans, ideas and impressions on this matter.

Legal Aspects of Kickstarter Entry

Thanks to personal connections, we were able to conclude an agency agreement with a firm from Washington state. This is a real company that has been doing business in the States for more than ten years. However, Amazon verified its account for more than eight days, requested a huge amount of documents, and on the sixth day requested all documents from scratch. In general, it was very tiring and troublesome.
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What conclusions can be drawn from here? The most important conclusion that we have made for ourselves: the Delaware or any other offshore will not pass verification with a probability of 99%. If you want to work with Amazon, it is better to forget everything you read about offshore companies in the United States. About a company registered specifically for Kickstarter or other Amazon activities a week or a month ago, nothing can be said for sure, but be prepared that if you do not have a solid payment history in the United States, Amazon will take you out of your soul piece by piece. After talking with people from the Russian group on Kickstarter, we learned that IndiGoGo is much friendlier in this regard.

There is nothing special to say about moderation on Kickstarter, it took 12 hours. If you meet their guideline, then it should be so. True, some friends wrote that they were waiting for moderation for two weeks, but this is more likely an exception.

Community influence

If you have a more or less large community of fans, this does not guarantee you anything on Kickstarter. To this must be prepared. People may be ready to buy you a game on Steam for twenty, and at the same time not come to Kickstarter for the game for the top ten.

This is especially true of people from Russia and Eastern Europe. In many places, it is still believed that the easiest way to buy a game is to buy it in a real store, on physical media. In practice, this means that you will have to look for contacts with the Western press, and better specifically with the state press. Various PR agencies can help here. They can detect errors and improve your press releases at an early stage, as well as help with sending editors to hundreds of specialized sites. We used the services of the guys with iSpreadNews .

Another important observation concerns project readiness. If you have a place or feature in the alpha stage, it is better not to show it. You can shout that it is only alpha, but the verdict will be unequivocal - that is how it will look in the final version.

About our project

At the end I will tell a little about the project. Steam Squad is a turn-based wargame in the spirit of Silent Storm, but about the First World War. About the first world in an alternative universe.

In developing the game, we have relied on a thoughtful universe and plot. The history of the world is painted in detail since the XIII century. The technologies of the parties are thought out right up to the fleet composition. In the game itself, all this will be described in detail over 30 missions, 10 for each of the three factions. In principle, what a step-by-step wargame is all represent, but no matter what people make hasty conclusions on the video of our alpha version, I’ll clarify that the game has a unit-controlled vehicle, stationary artillery, destructible pillboxes and shelters, manual artillery, fighting in the port against the background original aircraft carriers and many other interesting things.