Category: Game Development

Months ago, I wrote about how glad I was that I didn’t create a Kickstarter campaign to help fund Stop That Hero!‘s development. It wasn’t because I didn’t think Kickstarter was a good idea. It was because I didn’t want to do a half-ass campaign as an afterthought.

When Double Fine Studios had their record-breaking campaign, I was surprised by how many people thought that this meant that Kickstarter was a fantastic fundraising opportunity for indies. Granted, there’s good news that projects by people such as Tim Schafer and Kevin Smith can be funded without needing a huge publisher backing them.

But these people are celebrities. Of course they’re going to get a lot of attention and pledges. What about Joe Indie, the obscure person with the yet-realized dream?

Kickstarter is not a magic money machine. People can and do fail to get funding.

But perhaps the money isn’t the point.

As Corvus Elrod wrote recently in Every Kickstarter a Success, the crowd-sourcing site “is the most affordable and brutally efficient marketing tool” he’s ever used.

… the type of audience intereaction that Kickstarter makes possible is enormously valuable and the fact that the only finanical risk you take is not getting funding for a project that likely doesn’t have an existing market to sustain it anyway, there’s simply no reason every Kickstarter project shouldn’t be considered an overwhelming success – providing you simply do the hard work.

One of the toughest things to do when running a game development business is figuring out what project to work on. You can’t just work on what you think is fun and hope it pays off. You have to do market research to find out who your customers are and what they want. Otherwise, you’re hoping that when you release your game, your interests overlap with the interests of enough customers to sustain you. It relies too much on uncertainty and luck.

Kickstarter is great for measuring such interest in your project. For one example, Christopher Williamson of DreamQuest Games recently finished a campaign to raise funds for Alpha Colony: A Tribute to M.U.L.E..

While the campaign fell short of the $500,000 he was hoping for, he did manage to break $100,000 in pledges with almost 1,000 backers. He’s written up a post on 20 Ways to Screw Your Kickstarter in which he talks about the lessons learned.

But his Kickstarter update post indicates that they got the validation they needed for this project: “The world has shown it wants Alpha Colony to be built and therefore we are making some big changes in preparation for a second launch on Kickstarter!” Keep an eye out for the Alpha Colony relaunch in weeks, with an updated focus on multiplayer and a different funding target.

Ian Bogost wrote that he thinks Kickstarter is less of a fundraising platform and more of a new kind of entertainment: “It’s QVC for the Net set. And just like QVC, the products are usually less appealing than the excitement of learning about them for the first time and getting in early on the sale.”

Perhaps that’s partly true, but being able to measure that excitement as early as possible is vitally important to the success of a project, and ultimately, to a business. If Kickstarter and other crowd-sourcing sites make it easier to get that early feedback, it translates into a lot less wasted effort.

A month ago, there was a post on Reddit asking what people thought about indie developers asking for money up front.

Some people are fine if they get a good quality playable build for pre-ordering, but no one seemed to be happy with the idea of funding basic engine development. It seems the general consensus is that people are getting tired of the so-called “fad” of funding a game before it is finished with no guarantee that they will see a payoff.

Minecraft‘s wild success through pre-orders aside, it’s not really a new funding tactic at all. Lots of indie developers have tried to ask for money before their games are finished, and some have seen more success than others.

The Indie Game Development Survival Guide by David Michael mentions how Samu Games started selling Artifact when it was in the beta testing stage, complete with perks for early customers. And this was in 1999.

Today, sites such as KickStarter and 8-bit Funding have enabled a number of high-profile projects to get funding from fans. Of course, a lot of projects don’t get funded and therefore don’t become high-profile.

So if you don’t have a big name to leverage like Notch or Andy Schatz or Derek Yu, are you doomed to obscurity?

No, but obviously an existing name brand helps. Otherwise, success at crowdfunding requires hard work to get your name out there. In other words, marketing. And you have to be able to demonstrate you can deliver the goods.

I started taking pre-orders for Stop That Hero! late last year, and I’ll admit feeling a bit anxious about it at the time. I didn’t have the game in a playable state yet, and here I was asking people for money in anticipation of the initial release.

While I didn’t get many pre-orders, it was definitely a nice feeling to see people actually spending some money on my game. It showed some interest, and it gave me a productivity boost to know I had existing customers to satisfy.

Now, when it comes to how I marketed the Stop That Hero! pre-order, I’m sure I did a lot of things wrong. Perhaps I should have had more videos of game play as I continued work. Maybe I should have been posting more screenshots. I could have chosen to prioritize work on certain features in the hopes that they would excite players more than the features I did work on. And maybe I wasn’t very assertive with asking for pre-orders in the first place.

At the time, I was struggling to get the alpha build across the finish line, but I kept getting good feedback from playtesters. Since the game was good enough to provide some enjoyment to players, it meant it was good enough to ask for players to pay for that enjoyment.

Now, of course some people weren’t happy with the idea of paying up front for a game they couldn’t see. And it’s hard to blame them. Since many game projects don’t get finished, it’s asking a lot to essentially gamble the cost of a pre-order on an unknown. Especially when indie developers don’t necessarily have the offsite backup solutions of larger studios when disaster strikes. See the Project Zomboid burglary for an example. All of their code was gone when someone stole two laptops, so it was a huge setback for the developers who had to rely on outdated backups to continue.

And it didn’t sit well with some of their customers, judging by the Reddit thread. It seems this experience turned some people off of pre-orders and paying for early builds in general.

All that said, it seems that making pre-orders work requires regular, quality content. Basically, if you stop talking to your customers and prospects, they’ll stop caring.

But if all you do is talk and never produce anything, no one is going to stick around. Whether you’re taking pre-orders or pledges, you have to be able to show that you can deliver results.

If you can do both, then pre-orders are worthwhile. Otherwise, you’re wasting your customers’ time as well as your own.