I’ve just finished up running Kickstarter campaign for my roguelike survival horror game Phantasmal.  I managed to just make my funding goal on the last hours of the Kickstarter.

Kickstarter Page

Steam Greenlight Page

Gamasutra Article

You may have read about a lot of campaigns that were massively successful and really smashed their funding targets - this is not one of them.  

Overall, funding was adequate, but our raw backer uptake was fairly low in comparison to a lot of other projects, i.e. less than 200 as opposed to the typical 500-1000 for most average games.  We seemed to run out of steam after the initial spike of activity.

I’m not sure what the causes are specifically, but I can take some educated guesses.

So really, we just crept over the line but I hope that my experiences will help other devs out there as much as awesome devs like Bill Borman before me helped me with his excellent Kickstarter postmortem and advice in general.

Preparation

One of the things that we did do a good job of was the preparation.  I was fortunate to have a great kickstarter coach, Kat Jenkins from Multitude, who walked me through all the prerequisites prior to the campaign.  I had also been researching a couple of great sites:

The common thread amongst all the advice is that preparation is absolutely key to running a successful campaign.  In fact the majority of your effort should be directed at the initial preparatory tasks.  It’s analogous to cooking a great meal - the purchase and preparation of the ingredients normally takes the majority of the effort.  It’s the same for a kickstarter.

As such I wrote up a brief plan with all the required activities and milestones.  Having a plan is crucial, especially from a mental standpoint.  A Kickstarter can be a real emotional roller coaster ride, and when you feel really down about it, you just have to make sure you look at your plan and see if you’re on track.  Judging progress objectively is important.

The preparation tasks included:

Backer Momentum

One of my goals was to have adequate momentum through the course of the campaign to ensure we made it to the end.  Sometimes if a project does particularly well, it can experience an almost exponential growth curve in funding.  However, I was being realistic and expected a reverse bell curve like so:

By the end of  Day 1, I needed to get 10% funded, by the end of week 1 I needed 30%, etc… to maintain adequate momentum.

Thoughts on Social Media and Forums

PR and Reviews

From a marketing standpoint, even though we didn’t have a stellar backer uptake, I think we made some outstanding achievements:

Here is a list of all articles during the kickstarter

The following are the highlights our marketing campaign:

Although the the PR didn’t lead to raw backer numbers, it did establish a brand and awareness of our project and us as a team.

Youtubers

Youtubers have been hailed as indie developers’ best friends, as they can get us a lot of exposure.  I went through pixel prospector’s big list of youtubers and methodically went through most of them, emailing them or messaging them directly through Youtube’s messaging system, requesting that they play my game.

I was mostly ignored, but the many that came back were amazing.  Most notably, a few of the biggest Youtubers responded: PewDiePie, LordMinion, Squeezie.

Overall I’m amazed by these incredible people who do this largely for the love of gaming.  I personally do feel very lucky and grateful for their help - they are indeed crucial to us indies.

I put together a tribute montage youtube video for them as a sign of my massive appreciation.

Statistics

Here is a breakdown of the sources of the backers.

The articles on RPS, IGN and PewDiePie’s video seems to have had the greatest impact.

Note that while overall backer numbers were low, our press brought in some of our biggest individual backers (e.g. one backer who saw the PDP video pledged $1000, and another who saw the IGN article pledged $300).

Few people who visited the page watched the video to completion, which indicates that the video wasn’t up to standard.  I’m not entirely sure what would constitute a “good” video, but perhaps a better gameplay trailer with higher quality video overall would have helped.  The length of the entire video could have also been considerably shortened.

I noticed that near the end when I changed the video to be a bit less serious, the percentage of plays completed rose slightly.  It probably does pay to do a video that shows your passion for the project.  

The $15 reward tier was the most popular by far.

Analysis

Ultimately, although we did just scrape through, I think the campaign could have been improved in a number of ways.  I think that we did prepare to the best of our ability, which is why there were no clear cut answers (to me) why we didn’t get more pledges.

Here are some of my guesses as to why the campaign didn’t do better:

I also learned that some of our strongest supporters were people who really understood the game, or were people who I interacted with personally (e.g. at expos or via emails).

Conclusion

I think the two most critical were probably the uniqueness of our game (or perception of it) and the fact that we didn’t have a large enough and engaged fanbase from the start.

We do now, even though it is relatively small, but it is a start!

So the question is would I do this again?  It was massively stressful - a true emotional rollercoaster, but at the same time I met some of the most incredible people during this journey and had some amazing experiences.  So yes, I’d do it all over again!

By the way feel free to vote for us on our Steam Greenlight Page!