Why can a Kickstarter Succeed or Fail - An Overview

So I just thought that I would give an brief overview of why I think Kickstarters fail or Succeed.

  1. Press coverage - Getting the word out is one of the main reasons that a kickstarter can fail or succeed. The More hits your Kickstarter page - gets the more likely you are going to be funded.
  2. Prototype or Working Demo - So this is another one that can be attributed to a kickstarter failure. No prototype or Working demo of one of your game / Product is another big one.
  3. Not enough Content to show - During a Kickstarter people will be wanting to see more and more content from your team. Not having enough can be a big problem having backers pull out.
  4. Mental Stress and lack of sleep - Running a Kickstarter pretty much puts you in the spotlight of thousands or more. So expect stress and not a whole lot of sleep due to answering peoples questions and concerns.
  5. Keep Backers in the loop - If something comes up during or post kickstarter keep the backers in the loop. Explain the steps that you are taking to rectify the problem(s).
  6. Lack of a Budget Breakdown - Tell people where the money is going. Give them a breakdown / Budget for your bear minimum goal and expand it as needs be.

Please do not take this as fact but as 100% personal opinion.

I hope that I have helped the I Novae team in some way shape or form with this post.

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To expand on 3, there must be content in advance to give updates during the whole campaign. People expect updates, it helps keeping media covering and “making noise” to raise more awareness, and you won’t have time to create it once the campaign will have begun (because of 4).

That said, I’m pretty sure they looked very closely at what worked, what didn’t and the in-depth analysis some people did on the reasons. There was quite a bit of discussion and useful links given in the forums, though I don’t remember if it was here or on the old ones.

The only thing I am a bit wary about is how the video will be done - this can easily be screwed up and can make the difference between great success (Limit Theory) and complete failure (Nexus 2), even for campaigns full of potential. Analysis on campaign videos are rarer, though, so I’ll assume they did read them and will do it right anyway!

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  1. Most people don’t like the project at all – happened to the only Kickstarter I’ve ever funded because I WANTED TO PLAY IT, but all the other contributors only wanted to support the dying developer (GPG). :frowning:
  2. Not enough banana bread to serve.

I had those listed as 7 and 8 but Discourse is a bully.

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I remember backing Chris Taylor’s Wildman - I Still think that it has potential. :smile:

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Frankly, I think the Kingdom Come Deliverance Kickstarter was a failure relative to what it could have been. Now it may very well be that once they start crowdfunding on their own site, it will pick up and blast off. But baring that let’s look at the numbers.

Mount & Blade, the original not even Warband, sold more than 30,000 copies when it was only in beta. My conservative estimate is 60,000 when all was said and done. This was strictly a PC game.

Skyrim sold more than 20,270,000 units across 3 platforms.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that the end result for Kingdom Come should be between these two numbers. It has better graphics and physics than Skyrim (Bethesda’s engines have always seemed clunky to me), and will feature the best of both games minus the magic and dragons from Skyrim. Kingdom Come also has an advantage to Mount & Blade in that it will be PC, PS4, X-Box, Mac, and Linux.

They only secured 35,000 backers.

Star Citizen, what I’m told repeatedly is a niche game, secured 79,000 backers during the initial crowdfunding run.
What the hell happened?

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I’m so pissed it was cancelled! I heard GPG had several other projects which were about to go into beta-testing. Unfortunately, their funding publishers’ executives had changed since these projects started and the new assholes decided to throw GPG’s other (almost finished!!) projects into the gutter as well. Idiots.

War Gaming (the company who acquired GPG) is equally as lame, by the way. -_-

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/ off topic

  1. Number 7
  2. Number 8

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  1. Number 7
  2. Number 8
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