Crowdfunding For Video Games — Essentials
While not as prominently featured as in the past, crowdfunding campaigns for video games have seen a regular and steady presence on Kickstarter, with an average of 400 campaigns funded every year. The current funding climate has also renewed interest in the idea of raising funds from the players. This post is designed as a guide for studios considering a Kickstarter campaign.
Crowdfunding Fundamentals
Crowdfunding is a unique exercise. Asking your audience to financially support your endeavour, months, sometimes years)before the game is commercially viable is not an easy task, and certain projects are more suited to this than others. This short guide covers a number of key notions for launching a video game crowdfunding campaign. Before detailing projects that work best, there are three types of projects that often struggle to raise money through crowdfunding:
- Mobile games — There are multiple reasons why games on mobile are not well suited for crowdfunding. What the public is willing to spend on those types of games is key. When the average amount spent is lower than the cost of a PC game, it dictates you’ll need many more backers to support you. The Kickstarter community doesn’t show a particular interest in games released on mobile.
- Free-to-play games — In essence, F2P is the opposite of crowdfunding. F2P is the promise to try the game for free first, and then eventually spend money on it. Crowdfunding is the opposite: you give money before you can actually play the title.
- Games for children — A challenging category when it comes to marketing. Games for children struggle to raise money as it’s often difficult to gauge the delivery window of the game, and whether the intended audience’s tastes will have changed by then.
In contrast to this, certain games have qualities that make them particularly well suited for a crowdfunding campaign. Often it can be boiled down to projects where the potential backers have an emotional connection with the game, whether that’s because of its theme, its genre, or its art style.
Here are a few examples of the type of project that tend to do particularly well with crowdfunding:
- Brands with a strong emotional connection — Having an existing brand is key to many successful campaigns. At one point it was reduced to nostalgia, but I believe the appeal is significantly wider. One aspect that is essential here is not only having that brand, but to also have access to the audience of that brand. An interesting aspect here are projects that are brand-adjacent. Many successful campaigns have branded themselves as a spiritual successor to a beloved franchise.
- Project from renowned creators — This is an offshoot of the brand idea, where the creator has their own personal brand to leverage. As John Romero discovered in 2015, a name alone is not enough; you need to present a comprehensive project.
- Unique Premise — A game offering a unique experience is well suited to crowdfunding. The unusual aspect on its own contributes to the message that it cannot exist (or fulfil its full potential) without community support.
You don’t necessarily have to tick these boxes, but it certainly helps. For a wider look at the video games that find success through crowdfunding, we can highlight some frequent points:
- Games in an untapped niche/underserved genre — If a game exists in a space where lots of those games release and satisfy the niche every year, it will be harder to convince that fanbase to crowdfund your project.
- Games with a strong art style — In a similar vein, games with a distinctive visual style stand out and often succeed on crowdfunding platforms. Games with a realistic style can struggle as they don’t leave a unique impression on potential backers.
- Games that cannot go to Early Access — It is not unusual when discussing with project owners that are exploring crowdfunding to have Early Access considered as an alternative. While the two aren’t mutually exclusive (more on this later), some games by their very nature are not a good fit for Early Access. The best example of this are narrative games. They don’t tend to be as re-playable as other genres, and their story can be spoiled, making Early Access a poor path to choose.
- Games with a wholesome cosy vibe — These do well on Kickstarter, with a community of well meaning backers supporting this trend. Simply put, cosy creators, fans and gamers like to help other cosy creators, fans and gamers.. The cooperation between projects that cross promote each other, does seem to feed that trend.
If your game seems to tick one or more of the boxes mentioned? Great, the work can now begin.
Pre-campaign
A crowdfunding campaign starts months before you push the ‘live’ button. While launching a campaign on a platform such as Kickstarter offers some extra visibility, the vast majority of your project backers will come from your own efforts, and that effort needs to start as soon as possible.
First, you need to build your audience. You can view detailed blog posts about this by Chris Z. What matters most in the case of a crowdfunding campaign is where you direct your audience as you build it.
A Tale of Two Masters
Sending your audience to your pre-campaign page on the platform you are using (also called Coming Soon page or Upcoming Project page) will provide the best results for your campaign and great insights on how well your campaign will perform once live.
When it comes to video games projects in particular, this is slightly more challenging. To maximise the commercial success of your game, many will tell you that you need to send your audience to your Steam page in order to accrue as many wish lists as possible. Feeding enthusiastic players to the Steam wish list algorithm is the cornerstone of most marketing strategies. With Kickstarter also requiring keen fans to be directed to your pre-campaign page, which should you prioritise when communicating about your game?
We usually recommend neither. Send your audience to your own website and landing page, and there, deliver a Call to Action to register on your newsletter.
Your landing page can also provide links to your Steam page and your crowdfunding pre-campaign page, but collecting your fans’ emails provide many more opportunities, and you still can promote both your Steam page and your crowdfunding campaign to them.
Once you have a page ready and you’re acquiring Followers on your pre-campaign page, consider the following:
- Campaigns that reach 20% or more of their funding goal in the first 48 hours are the most likely to be funded.
- On average, 10 to 12% of the followers of a campaign back it in the first 48 hours. The initial momentum is absolutely key, and your followers will help you here.
- By the end of a campaign, about 20% of the followers have backed the campaign. Followers that don’t convert on the first day still matter and will help you by the end.
- This data point is subject to a lot more variance, but we have frequently observed that video game campaigns often reach a number of backers equal or superior to the number of followers they had at the launch of their campaign.
As you arrive closer to your campaign launch date, these data points can become incredibly useful to help you gauge the potential you have at hand, allowing you to possibly adjust the scope of the project.
Things to know about Followers on Kickstarter:
- A follower of a campaign receives 4 notifications:
- At the launch of the campaign
- A reminder of the last 48 hours of the campaign
- A reminder of the last 8 hours of the campaign
- The campaign has ended but has Late Pledges enabled (a good reason to activate this option when you are putting your campaign together)
- You will NOT get the email addresses of your followers, but only the emails of your backers.
Building Your Campaign
We have been using the following template for video game campaigns, adapting it to the specifics of each project:
- Key features, USP overview + animated GIFs
- Links to store page / Discord / Social Networks
- (if you have a demo) Link to play the Demo
- Detailed key features / gameplay + animated GIFs
- (only once the funding goal has been reached) Stretch Goals
- (optional) Community Goals
- Rewards table, description and content
- Platforms on which the game will be available
- Languages
- Team presentation
- Timeline of the project
- Why Kickstarter?
- Risks
- (optional) Environmental commitments
- (optional) Project Budget
These broad categories, generally in this order, should help you draft your own page. Please note, it is very important to present the game well, and the first four sections are the most valuable. Include high quality gifs as often as possible to illustrate your game descriptions.
We highly recommend running a campaign when a demo of the game is available. If this is not feasible, it’s important to provide plenty of gifs and videos instead. If you can, include in your demo a Call to Action to check out your crowdfunding campaign.
Reward Considerations
Each project needs to lean on its strengths when determining backer rewards, but we can provide several principles worth following:
- Your main reward will likely be offering a copy of the game to your backers, at full price. A good way to avoid that tier to be compared to the game being available at launch is to add exclusive perks that will be valued by your most engaged fans. Typical perks include adding the name of backers to your credits, and offering a unique role to be displayed on your Discord (should you have one).
- It is common to see video game campaigns offer a reward tier that adds the game’s original soundtrack, and a digital artbook with concept art for the game.
- Crowdfunding platforms commonly support a system where you can either limit the number of backers that can choose a specific reward, or limit that reward for a period of time. Time-limited rewards are excellent for either your entry-level or next incremental reward, in order to drive momentum at the beginning of your campaign.
- Providing a form of early access to the game is often valued as part of a crowdfunding campaign rewards. Just be mindful to make sure this will only be offered to your Kickstarter backers and that other forms of early access, whether Steam Early Access or a Beta Test program, are separate. Your backers might not appreciate being charged extra for something that other people can freely receive.
- I usually strongly encourage studios to consider digital perks for their rewards as there are many ways to be creative here. Here are a few examples of creative rewards:
Thimbleweed Park offered backers that pledged $50 or more to have their name in the game’s phonebook.
Armello offered their backers a set of dice with a colour unique to Kickstarter backers. The multiplayer aspect of the game makes this reward particularly valuable as a way to show your early support to the game. On the other hand, the Bandit Clan exclusive DLC proved to be a challenge and the studio had to remove the exclusivity of this reward.
- You can consider physical rewards, but do not commit to these unless you have properly sourced the production for the items and have found fulfilment partners to handle the shipping to your backers.
- Campaigns sometimes offer as limited rewards the ability for backers to submit content, or their likeness, to be added to the game. If you do, make sure you understand the production costs, pricing those rewards tiers correctly, while being clear with disclaimers about the process and your ability to refuse the content submitted if not appropriate for your project.
Campaign Timing
Crowdfunding isn’t bound by seasonality, but you should still consider the following:
- Avoid the Christmas period (20th of December to 3rd of Jan).
- For video games specifically, you may wish to avoid launching your campaign during the June showcase period (the Not-E3 period).
- If you can, launch at the beginning of the week. Avoid Friday, Saturday, Sunday to launch your campaign.
- If you can, set the end of the campaign to the end of the work week. Avoid Saturday, Sunday and Monday to end your campaign.
- 30 days is the ideal length. If you can start and finish around the beginning of a month, you will make it easier for backers waiting for their monthly pay to make a decision to support your campaign.
Kickstarter has also recently added the option for campaigns to stay open for “Late Pledges” once a campaign is finished.
Parting Words
There is much more that can be said, but this post should place you in a strong position when it comes to crowdfunding your game. There a lots of valuable resources available should you wish to explore the topic more deeply:
- The blog from The Crowdfunding Agency. https://medium.com/the-crowdfunding-agency
- The Post Mortem for the campaign of Mika and the Witch’s Mountain (that raised EUR 1.3m) https://chibig.com/mika-post-mortem-part-i/
- My GDC talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks1XGS2JS6s&list=PLQBJSjIsYX6LeMdpDA3YSHhFkJzRjbgl3&index=1
