OKGD: Kickstarting Your Game

Editor's Notes

1. Hi, I’m James Simpson, the CEO and founder of GoldFire Studios, and one of the organizers of the OKGD. Today I’m going to be talking about funding your game through the crowd, and specifically with Kickstarter. I’ll be pulling from the experience we gained when running our own successful Kickstarter earlier this year at GoldFire. Please interrupt me at any point if you have any questions or thoughts, this doesn’t need to be me just talking at all of you the whole time.
2. So first, I’d just like to give a little background.
3. I founded GoldFire Studios in 2008 as a browser-based game studio while I was attending OU. Since then it has seen a lot of changes, but we are still focussed on the browser. Only now, instead of text-based browser games, we are focused on real-time multiplayer games using HTML5. We launched a social gaming platform called goldfire.me last year, and we’ll be releasing our first full-scale HTML5 game to the public this summer
4. That game is CasinoRPG, and this is the game that we successfully raised funding for on Kickstarter earlier this year.CasinoRPG is persistent open world that closely resembles an MMORPG; however, it runs in your browser using nothing but Javascript. In a nutshell, you start out as a janitor and work your way up through other jobs, missions, free to play gambling, and eventually you can buy your own plot of land and open a casino.
5. So the big question is why we decided to do a Kickstarter in the first place. Continuing on background, GoldFire has always been 100% bootstrapped. That changed slightly last fall when we entered the VentureSpur startup accelerator program in this very building, and we raised a small seed round through the program and associated angel investors. However, making a game like this as many of you know is incredibly time consuming and takes the inputs of a lot of talented people. So, we knew we would need even more funding to take the game to the next level. We also knew we needed another outlet besides our current community to market the game to and build interest around what we were creating.
6. Kickstarter isn’t the only option out there, there are countless clones and alternatives. However, there are actually only a few that can work for game projects. Probably the most noteable is Indiegogo, which is very similar to Kickstarter, except that it doesn’t curate its projects. The other difference is that you don’t have to reach the goal to keep the money. Another funding site similar to Kickstarter is ulule. This is essentially just a clone of Kickstarter, but there have been a good number of successful games funded through it. There are also two platforms that cater specifically to game projects: Gambitious and Games Planet Lab. We seriously looked at all of these options, but decided to go with Kickstarter because of its massive reach and name recognition. Player trust is essential to get them to plop down their hard-earned cash to help fund your game, so it is critical that they trust and recognize the platform you are using.
7. So that was a bit of background, now on to the preparations for our campaign.
8. One of the most important steps to creating a successful KS campaign is creating buzz through the media. This is also one of the most useful side effects of running a campaign besides the funding. However, just because you are running a KS doesn’t mean the press will be interested, you will have to put a lot of work in before you even launch to get noticed.The first step is researching every possible site that could cover you, from blogs to established news sources. We created an Excel file and broke these down into different groups based on category and then ordered them by estimated traffic size. Alexa on its own isn’t very accurate, but using it to get a general sense of traffic is quite useful. The next step was to go through all of these sites, find articles that somewhat relate to what you are doing, and then record the authors of these articles. This gives you a very detailed list of contacts that you can then reach out to when the time comes, and you’ll have articles to reference in your custom e-mail to each of them.One step that we didn’t do through lack of time, was reach out to some of these authors ahead of time. It is a very good idea to build rapport with these authors, as they will be much more likely to pick up your story when you launch. E-mail them just to chat about articles they have written.It is also a good idea to draft all of the e-mails you are going to send well before launch so that you aren’t scrambling the day before or the day of the launch. Then, just before your KS is set to launch, pitch these authors, giving them plenty of time to work on a story for the launch. One thing I did to help them out was create a DropBox folder with high-res images, a full press release, and other materials they might find useful for an article. You need to make it as easy for them to write a story as possible.
9. The next critical area has to do with your community. If you already have a community then this step is much easier. If you don’t, then you should have started building one yesterday. Your base community will be your street team, and these will be the ones that go out and virally spread your campaign. Don’t rely on early backers to do this for you, you need people that are ready to back it before you even launch. Make sure this community has a central location to communicate with each other, and make sure they know well in advance about the Kickstarter. One mistake we made was not giving our community enough notice to start saving up money to get the tiers they really wanted.
10. The third major area that you need to focus on during the prep stage is social media. Facebook and Twitter were our two biggest sources of backers, and this was because we had a solid social media strategy setup very early on. This is essentially the process we went through:Everyone on the team made a list of contacts from friends, family, Facebook, address books, etc. We then broke these lists up into influencers, in-the-know, and acquaintances. For the influencers, we drafted very personalized e-mails, and these are the people that we knew had the most reach on social media. For the in-the-know, we also wrote custom e-mails, but maybe not quite as detailed. And then, we had a general e-mail for the acquaintances.To make it easy on all of these people, we setup a special page that showed them 3 steps on how to help us: Tweet, Like, and Back. The page just had the 3 big buttons, and they just needed to click on each one to help out. We then sent these e-mails to all of them at the moment that we launched.In total, we got over 1000 FB likes and shares, and well over 500 tweets. This led to thousands of dollars of backing just from the networks of our friends that shared on social media. It also helped to create the surround effect where no matter where someone looked, they were seeing our Kickstarter mentioned. This was critical to the success of our Kickstarter.
11. So now that we’ve prepared for our campaign, how do we get it all setup and ready to launch?
12. The first step is more research. I know, research is boring, but it is absolutely critical if you want to have success. I spent hours scouring Google for tips and tricks from successful Kickstarter campaigns. I meticiulously looked through tens of the top game campaigns, looking for patterns that led to success. You will need to do the same thing with a focus on your niche to find the best course.
13. This also goes for building your page and tiers. We didn’t just start writing the copy and blindly creating our tiers for CasinoRPG, we poured over many successful Kickstarter campaigns and figured out the best layouts, writing styles and types of rewards. This all went through several phases of iteration until we finally settled on what would work best for us. There aren’t general rules for this, you need to look at games that are similar in theme or genre to what you are creating. However, it is better to have less tiers, early-bird limited tiers are essential, and keep your campaign to 30 days.
14. Finally, as you’ve probably heard before, the video is absolutely vital. A lot of backers won’t even look at your copy, they’ll just watch the video and that is what sways them to back or not. The vide is the first thing they see, and if you don’t have a video, you won’t capture that person. This again went back to more research. I personally spent around 2-3 hours watching the best Kickstarter videos out there before creating a script for our own video. If you have some good visuals to show off, it is generally good to get them in there early. And, unless you have a background in video production, hire a freelancer to shoot and edit the video for you. We wasted a lot of time creating a video on our own, and it was absolutely terrible. We would never have succeeded if we had launched with that video. Instead, we hired a freelancer for well under $1000 to use professional equipment to create a really compelling and professional looking video. Thousands watched our video and many backed before even finishing it, so I can’t stress enough how vital it is to have a good video.
15. So now we’ve got everything in place for the launch, but what happens after launch?
16. The hardest thing with a Kickstarter is keeping the momentum going. The first few days are very exciting as the early backers pour in, but the majority of the campaign turns into the valley of despair as backers barely trickle in. Be prepared to turn managing the Kickstarter into your full-time job during the whole campaign if you want to succeed. Even though you aren’t getting a lot of backers in the middle of the campaign, it is important to reach 70-80% with a few days left, so you need to keep a steady stream coming. The last few days you’ll see an even bigger spike than the first few, so don’t despair. However, in order to get that spike and to keep the steady flow coming in, you need to be constantly reaching out to more bloggers, tweeting people, posting on forums (but not spamming because you’ll get banned), posting on reddit, and doing all sorts of crazy thigns to try and get eyeballs on your KS. The thing you absolutely can’t do is launch and then think the rest will take care of itself, because now the hard part begins.
17. Okay, so some tips and tricks I’ve learned from managing a campaign:Again, FB and Twitter are critical. We were able to get people liking, posting, and tweeting about our campaign for 30 days straight. This kept a steady stream of new people visiting our page. I also put a lot of effort into tweeting people with large followings such as game journalists, poker players, and tech personalities. We ended up getting someone with close to 40,000 followers to tweet about our campaign and got $500 in a matter of minutes with around 10 hours to go in the campaign.It is also critical to reach 30% of your goal in the first 3 days. This is the tipping point, and if you don’t reach it fast enough, all potential backers will lose faith that the campaign will succeed. This is why it is so critical to get a local backing early to reach this mark as fast as possible.Like I said on the previous slide, this will become your full-time job. Anyone you encounter, bring up the Kickstarter. You never know where it will lead, and more times than not other people’s networks will help you get coverage or more backers.Don’t be silent. The reason a lot of backers like Kickstarter is because they get exclusive behind-the-scenes looks at the development of the game, and they get to interact with the developers. It is important to keep that line of communication open at least a few times a week.One thing that we tried out with great effect was directly messaging every new backer thanking them for their support. I hadn’t seen any other campaign do this, but I feel like I would feel pretty special if I got message after backing from the creators. This isn’t possible for some campaigns, but when you are just looking at a few hundred backers it can be used to really strengthen the community engagement.
18. Even though our campaign was a success, I think it could have been even bigger if we had done some things differently.Due to lack of time, the first contact we had with jouranlists was on the day of the launch. Because of this, we got very little press coverage around our launch. This also meant a lot more work was needed to get press coverage throughout and near the end of the campaign.A lot of our friends on our lists didn’t know we were doing a Kickstarter until they got the e-mail the day of the launch. Make sure they know when it is coming so they can be online and ready to help spread the word.We could have done a better job of getting the community involved and informed much further in advance. We thought we would build hype by concealing a lot of the information, but it just lead to confusion by a lot of the players.Don’t waste time like we did trying to create your own video, go hire a freelancer. There are lots of them out there, just check Craigslist.Finally, don’t exepct that you’ll be a staff pick or featured. First of all, I heard from a lot of people that you don’t get much of a bump, and there’s nothing you can do to control if you get selected.
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