On the 7th of May 2019, we launched a Kickstarter campaign for our game, Unbound: Worlds Apart. We aimed to raise $25,000 in 30 days. By the end of the campaign, over 1000 backers had supported us and raised $41000.
We are a team of just two developers who started working on the game in early 2017. In July 2018 we decided to create a Kickstarter campaign for Unbound for several reasons:
See if there is interest in our game
Increase awareness about our game
Increase our community
And, of course, raise funds for the game’s development.
Part 1 - Analysis - 10 months before launch
Our initial plan was to launch the campaign in October 2018. Because we didn’t have any experience with Kickstarter, the first thing we did was research.
First, we analyzed different Kickstarter campaigns of games within our genre (puzzle platformers), no older than 2 years, and made by unknown small indie teams just like us.
We got in touch with a number of developers that held Kickstarter campaigns and asked them to share their “behind the scenes” experience with their campaigns, all their do’s and don'ts.
What we learned:
Launch: Plan the date carefully when you launch your campaign. You really don’t want to launch the Kickstarter campaign during a major gaming event like E3 or Gamescom, when all the gaming-related press will focus on these events, leaving no room for a new indie Kickstarter campaign. During the Steam Sale or summer/winter holiday, when everyone is on vacation is also a bad time to ask people to support you. Also, October-November is the moment when all the big companies launch their AAA titles, stealing the spotlight. You should skip these months as well.
Community: You need to have a community beforehand. To get your game out there, you need people to know about you, your game and the progress of your game’s development. The bigger the community, the bigger your chance to be funded. The role of the community is crucial in creating initial hype to boost the campaign, and giving it a real chance to get funded. The majority of successful campaigns that we checked had over 1000 followers on Twitter and Facebook each at the launch. These followers need to be organic and engaged! Having 10.000 followers, but only 10 reactions per post is not a good sign.
Budgeting: You need to do your homework on the budget you’re looking for from your Kickstarter campaign. Our research showed that 2D puzzle platformers usually don’t get more than $20.000 - $50.000. We calculated the absolute minimum budget we needed to finish our game. For all the additional stuff we wished to have in the game, we created stretch goals. It's important not to reveal all the stretch goals at launch. After you reach one you show another one and so on. That way you can make the people more excited about what's next.
Tracking tools: Using tools like Kicktraq and BiggerCake is very helpful (they also have Chrome plugins to quickly check Kickstarter pages). It gives you the possibility to check the progress of your campaign almost in real-time, giving you a chance to make quick decisions to adapt your marketing strategy on the go. You can check how each update or marketing move you make impacts the campaign almost instantly, so it will help you plan the next step better. You’ll see the number of pledges and comments each day. For example, we noticed that during weekends or holidays there were fewer pledges than on a working day, so no major updates were made before such.
Mid-campaign marketing: Marketing during your campaign is important. Using the tools mentioned above, you can observe that campaigns have a bigger boost at launch and at the end, with way less activity happening during the middle. You need to come up with ideas that will have a big impact on your backers’ engagement with the campaign and that bring more people to the page.
Press: The media will not write too much about your Kickstarter unless there is a big hype around your game. They will also ignore you if there is a major gaming event going on.
Trailer: Games with professional trailers have greater chances of success.
Demo: Games with a polished demo have greater chances to get funded, especially when you’re an unknown studio/developer and it’s your first major game.
Steam Page: Have a great looking Steam Page to gather wishlists and followers.
Advertising: It works well if you have the budget and know how to do it. Since we are not in such a situation, we didn’t study and care too much about it.
As you can see, this data analysis takes lots of time but it’s really, really important that you do your homework and prepare thoroughly before taking this major step and launch the campaign.
We kept our eyes on lots of Kickstarter campaigns and various articles before we decided to launch our campaign. If you don’t feel ready to launch yours, don’t. In our opinion, it’s better to have a postponed but successful campaign than a rushed and failed one.
Based on our analysis we decided to postpone our campaign twice. First time we planned to launch the campaign in October 2018, but we delayed the launch for February 2019. We finally launched it in May 2019. We had plenty of reasons to delay the campaign and we accumulated quite a lot of frustration about these delays, but looking back, we are really happy that we did so.
Reasons for the delays:
Our community was way too small to sustain a successful campaign. We had 600 followers on Twitter and 600 followers on Facebook.
We didn’t have a “vertical slice” type of demo.
October is a pretty bad month to launch a Kickstarter.
Our Steam page was really bad looking.
We didn’t have a Discord server.
