While it had been a disappointment, we came out of Kickstarter highly motivated to get an actual playable demo in everyone's hands ASAP. We were able to continue development, and launched a stable, releasable Steam Early Access build as soon as possible. This approach of opening up to a beta community who were willing to buy an Early Access ‘pass’ instead of just backing a Kickstarter was a much better model for us. We gathered ourselves together, and found a way ahead to channel all our effort into applying for Greenlight on Steam, to be able to go on Steam Early Access. What did you do once the team accepted the Kickstarter wasn’t working? This is when we started to realise that Kickstarter was more like a ‘Kickfinisher’, and wasn’t a good fit for us. Our player type (competitive) really needed a better demo experience to believe in the dream. Unfortunately, this quickly dropped off though as more and more people were wanting a playable demo to actually get their hands on the game. We enjoyed a great initial response, with lots of excitement and buzz with news coverage. So what happened when you launched the ‘doomed’ Kickstarter? What was the response like? People need to connect personally with the developers, and we didn’t have enough of that throughout our campaign. It is also important to sell yourself - not just the game! Your backers want to buy into your dreams and story, and we should have been more open with our small team, ‘underdog backstory’. More backers would have been convinced if we could show more clearly what our graphics and gameplay moments could look like. We wish we had known that people really get sold on the final polish and look of a product. What did you wish you knew before trying Kickstarter? Make sure you give yourself a LOT of time in advance to prepare for a Kickstarter launch, if you go down that route. In short, yes, it’s VERY hard to prepare well for a Kickstarter. Making sure someone can be available 24/7 to respond to all the comments and questions coming in across all social media avenues, as well as the Kickstarter page. The need to have updates for an entire month's worth pre-prepared as much as possible. The pre-outreach to get people to prepare for it to start, so backers can hit the ground running on day one. The videos and editing - these are important! Having a demo or beta available helps HUGELY with engagement and validation. Getting the project to a presentable state showing a wide range of content and features. These are just a few of the things required (at a bare minimum) if you do try Kickstarter: Kickstarter campaigns are a huge amount of work, and we definitely underestimated how much time and effort it required, which were hours often taken away from development time. Was it hard to prepare for the Kickstarter? Here are some of the commonly asked questions we get asked from fellow ‘potential Kickstartees’, or others considering crowdfunding. We successfully continued development, opened up to a beta community with Early Access, and just launched our full release on Steam. Back in 2014, we launched on Kickstarter - and colossally failed!įor us, it was just the beginning and not the end.
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