Wanted to wrap up the numbers for 2015 before diving completely into 2016.

Posted on by Paul Beakley

Wanted to wrap up the numbers for 2015 before diving completely into 2016.

https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/2015-in-games-kittens-zombies-and-kung-fu

https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/2015-in-games-kittens-zombies-and-kung-fu

Published by Paul Beakley

I founded the Indie Game Reading Club in 2010. I've written and developed RPGs since the mid-90s, now I mostly talk about playing them.

0 thoughts on “Wanted to wrap up the numbers for 2015 before diving completely into 2016.”

  1. I would have like to see the success rate broken down more. From my very brief discussions with friends in the video game industry, I get the feeling that a lot of indie developers really underestimate how much it costs to finish a video game and bring it to market. While I’m sure the same is true of tabletop games, especially bits-heavy boardgames, I can’t help but wonder if the fail rate is higher for video games.

  2. The smooshing together of video, board and TTRPGs is something that bums me out about the KS approach to that group, although I can also appreciate that there’s surely a lot of crossover.

  3. Related only because I followed a link in your original link: I was looking at the Conan boardgame, which looks interesting, but features a lot of KS-exclusive upgrades. Stuff like that actually makes me less-likely to support a game at all. I’m not sure why. Seems really elitist, I guess, and hurts my black, socialist heart.. But it probably works overall, so I guess I’ll keep seeing it.

  4. KS has been a pretty relentless experimental lab in terms of dialing in what works on these campaigns. I’m always way more interested in interesting failures, though.

    One of the big BIG boardgame leaders, Jamey Stegmaier, did this crazy thing during Scythe where he wanted to try and reveal a new stretch goal/upgrade/whatever every day of the campaign, IIRC. Bonkers. Ambitious. Total flameout in the first week, and then he switched to his usual strategies. Backed huge but those first few days he got a lot of negative feedback. Cool, though, that he was prepared to experiment! Really only possible if you’re a Stegmaier, I think.

  5. I remember when Fate Core was going, how every few weeks a spreadsheet would show up in my inbox explaining the hundreds of stretch-goals, add-ons, and variations of print and pdf that were available. It was overwhelming and completely useless in calculating how much I wanted to spend. Like being slapped in the face with a math textbook. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since, and if I did, I would probably reconsider backing at all.

  6. Oh yeah, some of the miniatures campaigns have been straight-up batshit. Pages and pages of options and photos and hype and money goals and social media goals and and and. I think that phenomenon went a long way toward cementing the “Kickstarter is another word for preorder” thing.

    Still see it on some boardgames, especially when there’s a highly variable amount of bling. Mini games, still. It works.

    I dropped out of the Mare Nostrum campaign when my aggregate backing of $198 just further unlocked yet another goodie I felt like I couldn’t live without, which would have brought me to $230 or something stupid. Totally irrational to spend all that and totally irrational that I can’t live without the whole thing (like I did with Fief, which I don’t regret but I was less poor that year).

  7. I did end up dropping my pledge to Fate to 10 bucks for that reason. It was simple. I didn’t have to fuck with shipping. And anything I wanted to own I could buy from a store later.

    Delta Green got nothing from me for similar reasons. Once there are products I can see, and which are going to exist anyway, I will pick up what I will actually use.

  8. Brand Robins I’m seeing that happen a lot with the Burning Wheel Codex. It’s so simple and premium-free that there’s literally no reason value proposition at all to back it other than to get the book sooner than you would via retail.

    I saw a couple folks back out once they couldn’t get a signed copy with that reasoning and I was like huh!

    It’s not like he couldn’t add some stuff to make it tastier. I can only speculate that he literally needs only his print/art budget covered.

  9. Lately I’ve refrained from backing major studio products that are going to be purchasable later. I still back indie stuff that might not be otherwise available or that I’ll have to special order later.

  11. Ohhh. Yeah. Besides the fact that the Bridge Guardians between Canada and the US have made their riddles so hard that only the wisest can cross, the other main reason I didn’t back BWC is because I’m not a mega-fan and I’ll be able to take a look at it in the store. Early delivery alone isn’t enough to make me back something.

    This is also true when I want to back something at a digital-only level, which is increasingly common. If I don’t get at least some special reward or help unlock an extra piece of material or even just a “everybody gets paid a bit more” tier, I don’t bother, because it’s going to be on Drivethru in PDF for the same price or less after launch anyway.

    That’s also why I stopped backing videogames on KS entirely: by the time the game is finished its huge development cycle and its three years of “early access”, it goes on a Steam sale and can be bought with all the extra content for half of what I paid to back it.

  12. Jason Corley That’s really good! I wonder how common it is. Mine is close. I have backed 78 projects that have funded, and of those, I think three are incomplete for long enough that I would consider them unlikely to ever complete. Of those three, two of them have creators who still occasionally update about work on the projects so… maybe?

  13. My ttrpg fails/wtfs are already well known and we’re not supposed to say anything about them because we aren’t owed anything for our money, not even communication.

  16. I wonder how many KS campaigns could accurately be characterized as kickstarting  a business, as compared to funding a one-off project.

    I mean, lots of going concerns totally use KS as a hype machine and preorder platform.

  18. Yeah I have totally stayed away from those exploding mini campaigns after the original bones mini one. And even there I left it at the $100 minimum.

    But my success rate is pretty good across tt games. Only one that is truly dead. And another that I’m still getting updates for.

  20. But are they not counting “funded” as successful? ie 30% of projects fund. KS don’t care (much) about whether or not they deliver, as long as it is enough for everyone to keep throwing money in.
    I have 32 projects backed and only 1 that I count as “missing”, but I’m still getting updates and hopeful of eventual delivery. I have almost exclusively moved to PDF-level backing only as postal charges to Europe have sky-rocketed.

  24. Wow. Only two projects that I have backed failed to meet funding. I suspect that a) is because I tend to back indie TTRPGs, which have generally modest funding goals; and b) results in me thinking of KS as a form of preorder despite the countless times I’ve been told otherwise.

  25. I tend to back Kickstarters I know are doomed intentionally so I have a WHOLE bunch of failed-to-collect Kickstarters on my page. Don’t ask me why I do this. To know myself is a wisdom I cannot yet display.

  27. Interesting. Why wouldn’t you back a campaign that may fail to find?

    Also the 89% * 30% only applies to tabletop games. The delivery percentage is actually a little bit better in other categories and the average across KS is 90% delivery.

  28. Yeah “Failure” is a very Sujective term I think. Fail-to-fund is not Failure at all in my book. I mean how can it fail if it never even started? I guess the campaign to raise funds failed, sure, and I guess that is what Kickstarte themselves care about, since they pride themselves a platform to launch campaigns from. But as a potential Backer, the only failure I would count is “they got my money and I got nothing back.”

    I got only 1/44 of those so far.

    Then ther’s the “in-between” cases… If they got your money and you got the product but it was abysmally bad and hardly even usefull… is that failure? Failure to deliver what they said they would?

    I got 1/44 of those as well.

    If the Project is cancelled by the owner before the end of the fund drive, is that failure?

    I got 2/44 of these.

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