My initial thought is that shutting down Plus is gonna have a nontrivial negative impact on small press game Kickstarters.
Anyone have thoughts on that?
My initial thought is that shutting down Plus is gonna have a nontrivial negative impact on small press game…
Doubt it will be too bad. This place is basically an echo chamber at this point. My Kickstart metrics show most traffic did not come from G+.
Fraser Simons oh that’s interesting! Can you share your traffic data?
I gotta agree. The part I’m most worried about is the amount of resources and knowledge that will probably be lost for beginning small press games and crowdfunding. No matter where people end up it’s going need to be a lot of reinvention to get those tools back.
For Hack the Planet its an even split for people who pledged via functions on the KS website vs other traffic. Twitter was 10%, G+ 5%, reddit 2%, Facebook around 24% based on where I think non-referrer information is accredited to, which makes up the majority of the metric; the rest just random small sites.
I strongly suspect Facebook is the “serious” answer for publishers and anyone else monetizing their gaming.
Yep. You need to be on Facebook to get your stuff visible. Hack the Planet really drove that home for me. Good Society was doing ad boosts on their project the whole way through and cleared 100k. It’s the way to go for marketing, no doubt about it.
Any analysis of backer level per platform?
I don’t doubt you Fraser, but personally I’ve made lots of sales via conversations on G+ and none on FB. So it’s a YMMV kind of thing.
Not sorted by way of how they came to pledge per platform, just by reward tier overall. $40 level was 46% of the KS for Htp.
I experimented by boosting a post for Hack the Planet with $25 CAD and it garnered 2,500 page hits and almost a grand in pledges in 6 days. There is not really a comparison, marketing wise.
So far, about 10% of the external pledges on my active (tiny) space opera RPG kickstarter are from G+, but it is powered by Fate, and the Fate G+ community is quite vibrant.
Losing any organic reach doesn’t seem like a good thing, but probably not the end of the world.
Forcing the clusters of community that do exist to reinvent themselves or die isn’t a good thing for indie gaming.
As a pure consumer, my exposure to small, indie RPGs has been almost entirely linked to G+. The only other social network I’m currently on is Facebook, for better and for worse. But my connections to gamers and gaming-related groups on Facebook are nearly non-existent. I would rather shove an ice pick under my fingernail than navigate another public (or private) RPG community/group/whatever on Facebook. I can’t imagine some of the Kickstarter groups (that share projects) could be any better.
But I also tend to cultivate my friends lists on any social media (or whatever) with a fine tooth comb. I don’t generally add friends/acquaintances willy-nilly, so the number of connections I have to any given vector (gaming, politics, food, whatever) is low.
TL;DR: What I’m trying to say is this: I’m wondering if consumers on G+ will find the shutdown more difficult than the game designers/project creators?
14% of Seco Creek pledges came from G+, the second highest percentage after the 19% “other.” So yeah, I’d be boned.
Adam Day certainly it will mostly cut off my exposure to a lot of gaming related media and small press games are included. I’ll be back to relying on the rpgnet forums for the most part unless there really is a groundswell of movement to something I want to involve myself in (ie: something not twitter or facebook).