For your edutainment consideration.
Before we begin, I am obviously no expert in running a Kickstarter campaign, but I have paid attention to enough campaigns over the past ten years that I have something of an idea on how a developer can help their campaign get some more eyes and a better response. Keep in mind this is not a fix-all guide. If your game is crap, jazzing up the Kickstarter isn’t going to help it much.
And while the article does have specific examples, particularly campaigns that are still live (as of this publishing), I don’t want the creators to feel like I’m calling them out personally. This isn’t about the quality of the creator, it’s about mistakes in the advertising of the game. In other words, don’t email me about how my website is harming the indie games sector because I said your game looks boring, or tell me I’ll be hearing from your lawyer like I get every other time I talk about campaigns, because I know you can’t afford one.
Without further ado, let’s talk about Kickstarter.
DO: Show Off Your Game
For this example I’ll point to Lazr, A Cyberpunk Clothformer. First of all we have an eye-catching title. Clothformer? What’s that? I immediately want to know more and click on the campaign page to find out. Rather than forcing me to read some long and boring pamphlet, I immediately start seeing gifs of the game footage. Question answered, my attention is even more focused.
If you want me to back a game, you need to show me the game I will be backing!
You obviously want text explaining what your game is, but you want something that can explain it visually in less than ten seconds so your readers get a taste and are interested in continuing to read. There are a lot of games on Kickstarter, you don’t have much time to grab my attention. Show something eye-catching and they will want to know more about the game.
Compare that to Aquathereum, a game that has $2 pledged with basically no time left. Aquathereum has four paragraphs of nonsense most of which doesn’t have anything to do with the game itself, talking about blockchain and who the hell cares? It dubs itself an “unscripted blockchain integrated (MMO) game” and honestly even as someone who writes about games constantly that is meaningless to me.
Nobody knows what Aquathereum is, and nobody backed Aquathereum. You can see what Lazr is within ten seconds of opening the Kickstarter page, that’s why that campaign is successful.
DO: Have A Demo
The demo itself doesn’t have to be playable. Take Lazr up above for example, the gifs presented on the page are a great explanation of what a “clothformer” is and how the game will work. The fact that the developers actually have a playable demo is icing on the cake.
Having a demo is important because it does two things; First it shows potential backers that you have some modicum of talent. Literally anyone can be an ideas guy and talk about the cool stuff they’d put into a game. I can do that from the toilet. Even if you only put together a proof of concept demo, it assures backers that there are competent people that might have the capacity to see the game through to completion. Second, it shows planning and forethought. If your demo looks like crap, it won’t gain much confidence in the final product. If the demo is good, it shows that you are willing to put in the extra work to present something and sell your game.
DON’T: Tell Us The Kickstarter Is Pointless
Depending on how you view Kickstarter you might see backing a project as a form of extreme pre-ordering or a really stupid form of investment that has high cost with no return. Regardless, you as the Kickstarter…starter are supposed to be convincing me, the dude with the cashola, on why I need to help fund your project. And unlike an investor, I’m backing specifically because I want to use the thing you are funding.
So don’t tell me that the thing will get made regardless. I’m using Lady Yrsa “Search For Astrid” Open world RPG as my example but this is everywhere on Kickstarter. Lady Yrsa sounds like an interesting game, but you know what? Daniel just told us that it’s perfectly fine to ignore it because funding or not, it’s going to come out.
“Even if the project does not get funded it will still be made and put on a platform for sale.”
You mean I can save my money and just wait a couple of years, and if by some circumstance the game doesn’t come out I don’t lose anything? Well I have nothing to gain and everything to lose. You need to give me a reason that this project must be backed before the timer runs out.
You don’t walk into a bank and ask for a loan to buy a car only to say “whatever you can loan me I can buy the car straight up cash.” They won’t give you anything. Trust me, I’ve tried.
DON’T: Load Your Campaign With Nonsense
The Babilon is an open world medieval game and I know nothing else about it because the creator Ricardo filled the Kickstarter campaign with paragraphs upon paragraphs of nonsense. It reads like a history textbook about ancient Greece and you know what? I don’t care about that right now. If I’m clicking into the campaign, I want to know about your game. I don’t care about the Helots.
Don’t be like The Babilon which has a completely legitimate and not at all tip-jar-stuffing $50 from one backer who is totally not the creator. Don’t half-ass your campaigns. Talk about the freaking product. It makes it so much more interesting for the potential backer when you do. It also sounds like less of a scam.
If you don’t care, they won’t care.
DO: Have Some Humor
I’m going to tell you a secret that most people don’t know about video games, but it’s a closely guarded secret that the Gods of gaming will smite me if it becomes mainstream knowledge so listen close and don’t tell anybody: People like to have fun with their video games. I know, right? My mind was blown too.
Take Rustler: Medieval Grand Theft… Horse? for example. The name is funny, the name gets your attention. Then you click on it and the first thing you see is a 13 second video where a bard sings about the Kickstarter campaign but it’s a parody of the Witcher song (topical, timely) and then he gets punched in the face. I don’t know if that’s a nod to the Witcher show but I don’t need to know to laugh at it.
Then the second thing is a trailer for the game that is also a cleverly written rap song and you’re like “ok I can dig it.”
Then the Kickstarter goes crazy with features like police horses with flashing lights, and it’s pretty obvious that this is going to be a parody game. It’s fun, by people who clearly understand that gamers want fun games.
And I should note that I’m not saying your game has to be silly. Serious games can and have performed well on Kickstarter, but those titles had gameplay behind them. Throwing up a Kickstarter asking for thousands of dollars to fund your game about your abusive childhood is…awkward to say the least, and it isn’t going to get much of a following if you don’t have anything backing it other than details that are far too intimate for our relationship as creator and consumer at this juncture.
As terrible as it sounds, there are thousands of self-made video games and films about the creator’s trauma released every year. You have to put some effort into the Kickstarter otherwise people will just move on to the next thing.
DON’T: Confuse Me With Your Confusing Game
I’ll point to The Eyes of The Cat for this one. The art style for this game looks pretty interesting, but then I read about it and got confused and my interest disappeared.
This is how The Eyes of the Cat describes its gameplay.
“The game system is based on “Player 1 versus Player 1 versus Player 1”. Imagine that you play a chess game in which three players can play, but you are playing alone against yourself. You will play turn by turn the cat, play turn by turn the cat, the eagle and the child (With the help of the child you will need to catch the cat). As soon as you get out of character, he will continue to play according to the same mode (for example: stealthy, audacious…). The goal of this system is to make you play against yourself! The game system will allow you to see how you play and, therefore, to understand how you see the world.”
So this is where we go back to my first DO up above where I said that if your game is built on unconventional mechanics, you’re going to need to show me those mechanics in motion. I understand what a clothformer is because I was shown gameplay footage and given a demo. This paragraph? It is words, and I still don’t understand what the point or goal of the game is, or how any of that works.
And despite liking the art style, I don’t want to back something I don’t understand fundamentally how it plays. Also I Google’d the concept of “player 1 vs player 1 vs player 1” and I didn’t find anything. If you’re going to base your game on a confusing mechanic, either don’t do it on something virtually nonexistent or provide a link where I can read up on it.
In Conclusion (For Now)
Every time Kickstarter suffers more high profile failures, it raises more of a wall for up and coming developers to get their games funded. You can do everything right and still not have a successful campaign for one of many reasons; bad timing, bad presentation, saturation of the genre, competition, etc.
What creators shouldn’t be doing is hurting their chances of getting seen even more by half-assing their campaigns. Don’t throw up a few paragraphs and a shoddily edited video where you fiddle with the Unreal engine editor while talking about your game through a $1 tin can microphone you bought from Alibaba. Imagine you are going to an investor pitch meeting and the Kickstarter is your suit. Wear a fancy suit, don’t wear one of those tuxedo t-shirts like you did to senior prom. That’s why you didn’t have a date.
I’m going to end this article now because I feel it going off topic. I will follow up with more tips. Probably.
MMO Fallout 