Your Kickstarter Project: A Practical Guide

We are a Russian studio, more than twelve years engaged in the development of computer games. We have created “Mor. Utopia ”(Pathologic),“ Turgor ”(Tension),“ Turgor. Voice of Color ”(The Void),“ Eureka! ”(Cargo! The Quest for Gravity) and“ Knock-Knock ”.

A few years ago, on the advice of our out-of-date friend, we decided to try out the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform as a source of funding for a small game project.
')
Despite doubts, the first campaign was successfully completed in mid-September 2012. We collected forty one thousand dollars with thirty declared. With the money received, the game Knock-knock (Knock-knock) was developed and delivered to investors.

After the first test, we realized that crowdfunding is not only funding, but also a good advertising platform where you can hone your own PR skills, evaluate the attractiveness of the game for the target audience and get additional promotion immediately after the game is released.

Therefore, we decided to conduct another campaign. We are going to make graphically, technologically and gameplay a more perfect remake of our first game, “Mor. Utopia ”(Pathologic).

Not so long ago, fees reached the stated amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This is one of the largest results in the post-Soviet space, and we would like to share our observations on the course of two campaigns, which may be useful to other teams who have decided to go to Kickstarter or another crowdfunding platform.

We want to draw your attention to the fact that everything written below refers only to the projects of our studio. Of course, there are completely different campaign development scenarios, and only you can determine which one is relevant for your project.

Timing the start of the campaign

Since we are not a very famous studio, especially in the Western world, it was necessary to carefully select the time period: on the one hand, not completely dead, but on the other hand, not covered by major game releases and events.

We chose the beginning of September, because summer is the holiday season, and at the end of September - beginning of October, the promotion of major game releases begins, seeking to approach the Catholic Christmas at the peak of the PR form.

The day of the week is Thursday, the best time for press releases (on Monday-Tuesday, journalists are just starting to "swing" and rake the inboxes, and on Friday, for many, the week is considered to be completed).

The importance of the initial stage of the campaign

We offer a look at the graphs of the two campaigns taken from the site www.kicktraq.com (a good free resource for tracking statistics).



In the case of Tuk-tuk-tuk, the first small column is associated with the launch of fees at the border of two days (according to the time kicktraq). You can mentally imagine that it is added to the second.



From the graphs it can be seen that there is only one large peak of interest at the beginning of the campaign. Peak drops sharply, and throughout all the fees do not hope for the appearance of the second equal to him in size.

We believe that the main reason for the lack of bright peaks is that we do not yet have enough weight for the foreign press. We received heartfelt support from Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer and industry professionals such as Brian Fargo and Chris Evellon at the very beginning of the campaign, but at the time of this writing there was no support for the other major portals. The situation can be corrected either by outrageous antics - which we would not like - either by gradually increasing fame in the Western world, which is what we hope for.

By analogy with “Tuk-tuk-tuk”, we can expect a noticeable rise at the end, due to: a set of the required amount, cross promos and messages that Kickstarter sends to users following the project (by clicking the Remind Me button).

The initial data on the “Mora” collections are well approximated by a power function. If the trend had been preserved, then without additional PR, only at the inertia of the start, we would collect 66% of the declared amount, i.e. 165 thousand dollars.

Therefore, concentrate as much as possible on the beginning of the campaign. If you are not prepared enough to start - you lost the war. In our case, the total amount collected by 66% depended on the start.

Of course, such advice can only be given after the fact. In fact, none of us fully believed in such a start, we were amazed at the amount of fees: we did not expect to collect half of the amount claimed in two days (although it was necessary).



And the fantasy has already naively multiplied the first fees by the number of remaining days ...

Preparing for launch

Press

The press is a gun that needs to be charged long and hard.

Then we will discuss the foreign press, since we have a rather warm relationship with the Russian one.

Some of the contacts we have survived from previous projects, some had to be extracted with sweat and blood: we searched for all the articles that were ever written about us and tried to find out the contact details of the authors (some even had to write to twitter or communicate in even more sophisticated ways) . As a result, a list of 60+ live addresses was formed, with which it was possible to communicate directly.

As a result, we launched three “waves” of mailings on the collected press list:

1. Announcement of the intention to launch kickstarter. Got coverage from our long-time friends from Rock Paper Shotgun and - unexpectedly - from PC Gamer.
   
   
   
   
2. Announcement teaser site and video (about them below). When a video appeared in conjunction with a press release, the interest of the press towards us increased significantly.
   
   
   
   
3. Kickstarter launch announcement. We were pretty nervous before the launch of the campaign. The interest of the press to the first two newsletters was definitely, but it did not look stunning. However, after the kickstarter launch was announced, journalists and portals who silently received our letters were resolved with dozens of articles and news notes about the project!
   
   
   

It is impossible to say with confidence that the first two waves were needed, but it seems to us that despite the lack of answers, we prepared the press for Day X, providing a more coherent start.

Existing audience preparation

The key point in the preparation of the kickstarter was the point about the mobilization of our community, consisting of approximately ten thousand people (judging by the number of people registered in our VKontakte groups and on Facebook).

Of course, most of them would come to Kikstarter on their own, but the process would stretch for the duration of the entire campaign. We also needed a breakthrough at the moment of the highest attention - in the first two days.

Therefore, the feverishfeeling.com website was created, initially planned as a simple teaser site with a countdown to the start of the campaign and the ability to subscribe to a notification about its launch.

But in our studio, easy ways are not sought. As a result, the teaser site mutated into ARG ( “playing in alternate reality” ), during which participants received every few days letters that dealt with a certain disease that was rapidly taking the lives of people in our world, and about an organization trying to hide the fact the existence of an epidemic.

The result exceeded expectations: we just wanted to make a gift to the existing audience in the form of a small mystery that has been developing for 27 days, but in the end attracted a large number of people who have never heard of the game “Mor. Utopia ”, but were intrigued by the plot of the ARG itself.

At the end of feverish feeling, we attracted: 3,000 Russian-speaking subscribers, 1,500 English-speaking subscribers. They brought us at least 5% of all fees at Kickstarter (there is an opinion that the percentage is 2-3 times higher, since the site did not take into account all transitions).

In addition to mobilizing the audience through ARG and the social network on the first day of the campaign, we released an update to the Tuk-tuk-tuk project, notifying the contributors of this game about the start of the new kickstarter.

Roller

Movie - the first thing they see on Kickstarter. Our video was born in agony: it was filmed for half a year, and the concept changed twice. As a result, we stopped at the fact that he should retell the essence of the game in simple and understandable words, but at the same time be “in the style of Ice-Pick Lodge” - a non-trivial and in fact a separate work.



Many thanks to Scott Maclesley, who shot, directed and mounted this miracle. Also endless thanks to our entire community, who participated in the creation of the video. So, in December, more than a hundred people, in our call, came to the Central Telegraph building on Tverskaya, lay down on the floor in the hall, wrapped in white sheets, and in an hour built an impressive and plausible picture of an "emergency hospital." For the scene with the operation, we organized a trip to the abandoned hospital in the city of Pokrov, having put the guard to vigilance with a legend about the secret project “Mosfilm”. Themselves do the entire props. But the result justified the costs.

Pledges (contributions)

The most important contribution is the entry level entry. By choosing it, the contributor receives a digital copy of the game. Its price must be lower than the cost of the game after the release, otherwise there is no reason to buy it right now.

We divided the initial installment into two parts: a limited number of three thousand copies of twenty dollars and an unlimited amount of twenty-five. We assumed that the restriction would create a small stir at the start, thereby concentrating resources at the very beginning of the campaign. The expectations were met, but the opposite effect happened: when the limited installment ended, people began to buy the game more reluctantly. Apparently, the effect of being late is having an effect: the person came to the “shop”, and the most desirable have already been snapped up.



If we had a chance to return to the beginning of the campaign, we would increase the number of limited contributions to five thousand. But beware of changing the limits right in the process of fees. Adding new contributions and changing the limits of old ones should be taken very seriously, carefully calculating the consequences. The reaction of investors may be unexpected:

• Investors can start moving to a new contribution in large quantities, if it turns out to be unbalancedly attractive (kickstarter allows you to change the size of the investment right up to the end of the campaign). It is bad if it starts to move from more expensive levels.
• Contributors can rightly be offended. For example, we had the five most expensive contributions of three thousand dollars each, which were snapped up in the first days of the campaign. For a long time, we did not dare to increase their number, because we were not sure how those who had already joined the “closed club” would react to this. They decided to make changes only after talking to each of the five contributors personally. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that the success of the kickstarter and the game was more important for them than the privilege of awards. Still, one of them chided us for “reducing the exclusivity”.
  
• Another unexpected moment we encountered is additional in-game content. We had a few items and events attached only to certain awards. Beware of it! People want to get for their money - even for the cheapest contribution - a full-fledged game, and not a stump (and we understand them). We had to separately explain that neither the object nor the event are key and play a purely cosmetic role.

Physical contributions are the most expensive, but also the most controversial and complex in execution. Be sure to count: the cost of development, small-scale or individual production, packaging, delivery. And do not forget that you need to earn on them, because you release the game, and not to organize a company for sewing T-shirts.

It is worth mentioning the “cat in the bag” - a $ 47 fee, which gave the biggest fees for the game “Tuk-tuk-tuk”. In the course of the campaign, we didn’t tell us what exactly the investor gets by acquiring this award - we promised a secret. The mystery worked, but perhaps the success of this award is only the result of our image of a non-standard studio. We decided to repeat this experiment with a $ 100 contribution in the new campaign, and at the moment it brings 17% of the total fees.

Work during the campaign

From the above, we can conclude that up to 66% of the amount of fees the campaign could “roll down” on its own - as a result of the initial surge. But there were still 34%, which were necessary to get additional activity. There were no significant peaks in the graphs, so it should have been 34% labor.

Updates

The hardest work is to release updates. We do this about once every two days, but it is hard to maintain this pace.

Each update is automatically sent to depositors. Although it does not increase the size of the audience, but constant activity does not question the success of the project and does not give investors the opportunity to "jump off".

Our updates are organized in the form of texts about the game, written by team members. We believe that this increases the confidence in the project: you can watch the appearance of a working team, like fire and water, endlessly.

At some point we regretted not adding the team’s work to the main video. Take a look at the video from Moon Hunters:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/kitfoxgames/moon-hunters-a-myth-weaving-rpg

Everyone is busy with his business, it is clear that the team is there and that it works smoothly.

Show teamwork in your main kickstarter video. The way they draw, model, program. The view of a well-coordinated team increases investor confidence in the successful completion of the project.

Explain incomprehensible rewards in updates. After the update describing the board game in more detail, several contributors bought the game or raised their contributions. We expect the same effect from updates describing other physical rewards that people want to learn in detail before buying.

Increase audience size

The main problem of the middle of the campaign is to increase the audience. The first peak of popularity has passed, the exhibitor has done its job and ominously rushed to zero. Now only a permanent job will allow it not to fall into the final zero or even into a negative value (this was what we observed one day on Tuk-Tuk-Tuk).

Do not consider Kickstarter as a source of audience - this is not a magical place where their own community finances projects. Yes, Kickstarter brings a certain amount of purchases, especially if you received the “pick pick” icon (staff pick), but the volume of this audience is not very large.



Both of our projects received a staff pick. The share of users who came through Kikstarter was:

• Tuk-Tuk-Tuk (Knock-Knock) ~ 25%
• Mor Utopia (Pathologis) ~ 17%

The percentage is significant, but insufficient to become the basis of the campaign. In addition, the percentage will be even less if the editorial board does not choose your project. Therefore, from the very beginning, get ready for the fact that you yourself must lead the audience through the community and the press.

Let's take as an example the Molecat Twist project:

www.kickstarter.com/projects/molecats/molecat-twist-indirect-puzzle-game

The game came out on Kickstarter a bit earlier than “Knock-knock-knock”. The project has an interesting idea, it is well-designed, even has a demo, but collected quite a bit. Most likely, the matter is in the absence of the above audience, because the quality of the presentation is decent. We stumbled upon Molecat Twist before the very start of “Knock-knock-knock”, which made us pretty worried and doubted of success.

PR

Our friends from the gaming industry have complained about our bad PR since Tuk-Tuk-Tuk, even though we didn’t have that feeling. The fact is that “Knock-knock-knock” is a small game, so with PR we felt like bears in a china shop. We think that it is difficult for any small project to get good advertising coverage: it is awkward to shout about such games in squares - they are too small, they don’t want to write about large Internet publications.



With “Moore” it is easier - this is a huge game with seventy hours of gameplay, a couple of resonators, an intricate multi-layered plot. This time we tried to correct mistakes, follow the advice of friends and even attract several small advertising agencies abroad. But it seems to us that the amounts spent on them barely got out (if they got out). Perhaps this is not the fault of the agencies, the reason is complex here:

• We took care of the agencies just under the beginning of the campaign, so we had a small choice, and there was no coordinated plan.
• We make niche products, so it is difficult for PR people who are used to working with more standard teams and projects, especially with low budgets. Therefore, we advertise ourselves better. However, this does not mean that there is no such PR manager in the world who would suit us - we just need to look for the right ones.
• For PR, info feeds are needed. No info leads - no PR. We spent the main efforts on launching the campaign, leaving almost no content on it. And for PR, we need new screenshots, videos, demos, the development of which takes months.

Use any emerging infopovod for expanding the audience. For example, the game collected half of the entire amount for the first day - a great info point; collected the entire amount: we write an article and make a new press release.

Ideally, carefully prepare all informational channels before the campaign starts.

PS In the next room, several team members are discussing potential informational channels. Judging by the outbursts of laughter, the references to Putin, greens and feminism, the topics for serious information issues are exhausted.

Cross-promotion

The fashionable English word “cross-promotion” means mutual advancement: another project is written about you on the kickstarter, and you reciprocate it.

For the first time we tried cross-promoting at “Tuk-tuk-tuk”, and, to our surprise, he brought about one-eighth of all the fees (“Less” on the Sea).

At first, we had ethical disputes about the appropriateness of using cross-industry for the company's reputation. But in the end they agreed on the opinion that if one approached the choice of projects seriously and did not sell the soul to the devil, then nothing terrible would happen.

It is important to choose projects that you really like (all team members can do this), and not be afraid to refuse projects whose quality or style does not suit you, even if they have already written about you unilaterally (this has happened). You must be accountable to your investors and offer them only the good.

Stret goals

Toward the end of the project - if you see that you are collecting the desired amount - you should declare “super-goals” or “what will we do if we collect more”.

We prepared for “super-goals” in advance, although we did not quite understand the mechanism of their action. The goals are announced in the next update, the letters are sent to investors who have already invested in the project, and we only expected that some of them will raise their level of investment a little. This does not expand the audience, so no noticeable increase was expected.



In reality, everything turned out better: after the announcement of goals, the flow of users has increased. We noticed that the goals launched discussions in social networks, people wanted to achieve them. Some online publications used “super-targets” as an infoprovod.

However, in a few days the effect died away, but we hope for its revival at the very end of the campaign.

Kickstarter completion

After the end of fees, the kickstarter blocks the main page of the project, but you can still write updates. Therefore, do not forget to add to the pitch a link that investors will be able to give you money afterwards. We wrote for this a separate crowdfunding mini-system "Threads".

During and after the tuk-tuk-tuk fees, it was possible to collect about 15 thousand dollars - about a third of all fees - but at the moment it is closed for mobilization reasons (the kickstarter campaign at the time of writing was not completed yet).