What Underwear reveals about kickstarter.

Here is a great article on Business Insider.  Anyone considering a kickstarter campaign should give it a read.  It’s about underwear.  Also the problems that success brings.  But it also highlights one reason why game development works better on crowd funding than other products.  


In the case of Flint and Tinder, they have to produce 23,000 pairs of underwear, when they intended to make 3000.  In the case of Scrumble Ship Dirkson has to produce a single game (which gets copied many times).  Software is extremely easy to copy.  Physical goods are not.  Granted the manufacturing process makes it easier for fewer people to do more work, but even the most advanced manufacturing techniques can’t beat Ctrl C, Ctrl V.

Kickstarter can be a dangerous thing whether the project succeeds or fails.  Failing to plan for success can be as detrimental as failing to plan for failure. But know that as long as your swag is digital you have it better then Flint and Tinder.

Which Crowd Funding site should I use for my game?

Well if you're anything like Simon Roth, you use all of them.  Steam Greenlight, Kickstarter, and Indeigogo.  Why use just one?  Each game crowd funding site has strengths.  This is a pretty smart strategy.  Of course all projects should link to all others.

Greenlight Concepts
You can put anything up at any stage and use the site to gauge peoples interest in your idea.  Using the Greenlight concept page traffic can be driven from steam to your primary crowd funding site.

Kickstarter
The all or nothing popularity of Kickstarter has a good number of projects going here for initial funding.  Arguably more popular for game design at the moment, but unfortunately only one funding option.

Indiegogo
Different funding options (Fixed Funding and Flexible Funding) allow for more options when setting up a project's funding.

Simon also did something smart with the Indiegogo project.  Being from Manchester U.K. the kickstarter is denominated in pounds.  The Indiegogo however is in U.S. dollars.  Running one project in each currency means that he gets both U.K. and international (we U.S. folks) support.  Noticed the dollar amount on the Indiegogo campaign is set very low.  That's some good crowd funding strategy right there.

Is Kickstarter bad for games?

Not everyone likes kickstarter.  I do...  But then my day job is in financial services, so the complaints about kickstarter are peanuts in comparison.  Rab Florence's great blog THIS FUCKING AMUESMENT ARCADE makes a few points about why kickstarter is bad.  We've taken a look at the good stuff.  Let's look at the bad.

Most of this post was written in the voice of Mike Rugnetta... [insert link to future PBS Idea Channel episode].  There may or may not be a little man crush involved.

UK Kickstarter

Kickstarter launched in the UK last week.  There are some amazing looking games starting to filter into the categories. Games like Maia, and Elite: Dangerous.  For Maia in particular, the influences include some of my favorite games.  However other than a few mentions now and then, I'll pretty much be leaving the UK projects alone.  There is too much stuff out there already to be covering projects outside the U.S.

Gambitious, crowd funding games.

Have you heard of Gambitious yet?  After taking a look, it may be worth checking in with every now and again.  It has the look and feel of a kickstarter account, but offers both entrepreneur and 'perks' offerings.  They refer to it as a hybrid model.  Although only EU investors can be equity investors...  At the moment.

If the JOBS ACT opens equity crowd funding up the general public then perhaps they will open up the equity portion to the US...  There are, however, only about 7 games seeking funding on the site.  Not exactly gangbusters.  They have some amazing partnerships though.

Final verdict is a wait and see.  Maybe they will be huge, maybe not.  Good idea though.

Why do so many games go to Kickstarter?

The real brilliance of Kickstarter for game designers is the reversal of quality assurance.  Instead of paying people to debug a game, through kickstarter you can offer 'exclusive' access to Tester Only sections of the forum, and charge more for it.

It sounds snarky to say the really great thing about kickstarter is profiting from QA....  But I seriously considered paying Timber and Stone $50 to get that tier of reward.  For tiny indie game developers this is actually a really great QA solution.  However, if the AAA companies start doing it, that might not be so good.

What is a kickstarter that is not a kickstarter? Successful, apparently.

There are a couple big name game titles, from big players in the industry, who are using the Kickstarter idea.  But without using the Kickstarter website itself.  This is an interesting concept and although successful in a couple big cases is a terribly risky proposition.  The internet is all about removing the middleman.  But where does this trend lead?  Will this be the end of Kickstarter and Indiegogo as everyone does their own thing?

Space: the New Zombie Game.

Kickstarter has a whole host of games, and right now Space games seem to be extremely popular.  From strategy to tactical, to resource management these projects range from the one man show up to the professional studio looking for fund a sequel.   Here are a few of the space related computer games on kickstarter.  Not counting Scrumbleship, here are five new games up on kickstarter.

Two Successful Kickstarters

At some point these two should be analyzed a bit more for what they did well, and what they did badly.  For right now I just want to mention that both Scrumble Ship and Dysis have either reached their goal or completed their kickstarter.

Scrumble Ship ends today at 1:27 pm EDT and is over their goal.  Dirkson requested $8000, but total pledges at just over $12,000.
Dysis has 17 days left.  They started with a $5000 dollar goal, but so far have pledges of over $15,000.

Now that they have succesfully raised money will they go on to be successful projects as well?  I hope so, and I'll be following them to find out.

2 things we can learn from Dysis

Dysis is an interesting game.  The kickstarter video could use a little more polish, and the project overall doesn't motivate me to want to contribute.  But I noticed two interesting things.  The Minecraft business model continues to be used by new game development projects.  And small dollar goals.

Christopher Farrell is basically asking for people to pay for software and counting that as a success.  This is a very reasonable request for a professional with a day job trying to create a game in his spare time.  The stretch goals, and all money above the $5000 base are going to flesh out the software and get poured into the game.  This kickstarter is well designed for the creators situation.  Indiegames.com picked up on the story last week.

As of 1:11 today the kickstarter is successfully funded, with 18 more days to go.  They are closing in on 3x the amount asked for.  Things are looking good for games of this type, like Scrumbleship.  Has anyone else noticed many Space games out there lately?  Seems like Space is the new Zombie.

Kickstarter Reluctance

Old School (now SHAKER) seems like a great idea being put together by a solid company with incredible credentials.  You can tell that if they get the funding the project will be completed.  This is not 2 guys in a basement with no project management experience.  This is the real deal.

So why am I reluctant to back this project?  My gaming hobby (is it addiction or lifestyle?) started with Apple IIe, D&D in Jr High and Ultima on the Nintendo. But Old School gaming is not really interesting to me.  Perhaps my reluctance to be excited about this project is that game nostalgia has no hold over me.  Well maybe certain titles...

The story seems really compelling, a nice balance between D&D and Cyberpunk. AKA Fantasy and Sci Fi, the two big genre's from the 80's.  But it just doesn't compel me to support the project.  It's just not pulling the right strings.  It was featured by Kickstarter via tweet on 10/7/2012, so apparently there are some fans out there.

Their request for a million dollars feels high.  It doesn't feel like funding a kickstarter to me.  It feels like a Studio seeking investors.  Maybe kickstarter to me means funding guys like Xavi (Towns) and Dirkson (Scrumbleship).  Maybe at heart I'm an Angel, not a VC.

A really sneaky aspect of Kickstarter is that we each individually get to decide what kickstarter means to us.  To me, it's funding that little guy who has no support but has good ideas and can prove themselves.  I don't have any right or intent to tell you what you should support.  Nor do you have any right to tell me what to support.  The beauty here is that doesn't matter.  We all get to support what we want to.

Scrumbleship; more then Minecraft in space. Hopefully.

Minecraft is an inspiration for just about everyone who wants to design games. Everything from straight up copies to 'inspired by' titles are popping up all the time. There are plenty of not so interesting clones... cough Yogventures, cough. (Which feels more like a retaliation then a game).  But there are some equally fantastic projects such as Towns and now Scrumbleship. Check below the jump for an introduction to the Scrumbleship kickstarter and game.