Lessons learned from Kickstarter campaign

Greetings fellow gods,

If you've read the previous post, you already know that Soulash Kickstarter failed by missing 24% toward its goal, you know what I tried, and you saw some valuable stats about the outcome of my efforts. This article will present my thoughts about Kickstarter, what I've learned during the campaign, what mistakes I made, and what I will do to prepare better for the Soulash Steam release.

Is it worth running a Kickstarter campaign?

In my opinion, yes, it's worth the hassle, but you should decide what you want to accomplish and if failure is acceptable. I chose to gather funds for the graphics mod and try to go full-time indie dev (this one I'm still hesitant to contemplate, even more so to write it down, making the thought more real), but Kickstarters are "all or nothing". A question then comes to mind - can you put everything on the line for this Kickstarter? That's a stupid question, in my opinion. In today's day and age, we have so many options to pursue our goals, to get the funds to make our dreams a reality. To work hard for many years and then put everything on the line on a single crowdfunding campaign seems unbelievable to me. That's because Kickstarters, at least initially, were not meant to be used this way.

Kickstarters, in my opinion, exist to sell dreams, not realistic visions of great products. I don't think it's necessary to market a game that doesn't exist to stand out among the crowd, but I feel this is what the Kickstarter format promotes. You know, like show a beautiful demo of 2 hours prologue inside a single dungeon and then tell everyone that the game will have an open, procedural world. That the world will be filled with multiple competing factions. Numerous followers with their own stories. Even a robust character progression mechanism. It's cheap to make promises, grab the money, and then say, "we're working on it" for the next 10 years. Just let the player's imagination do the trick and don't deny a single thing. I'll get back to this when going through my mistakes, but the takeaway, for now, is that if you already have a great product that is getting close to completion, Kickstarter may not be the right choice for you.

Mistakes were made, lessons were learned

There are many mistakes to cover, so let's go through them one by one.

#1. Duration of the campaign

This one was significant. I've set up the Soulash Kickstarter campaign to last 21 days instead of a whole month. It was due to pressing time, as I've made a bit too optimistic assumptions when discussing the contract terms with Xiclu, our graphics designer. We were supposed to run the campaign sooner, but the preparation took longer. Different review processes on Kickstarter and Steam took longer than expected as well.

If I knew what I know now, I would have waited until the end of May and run the campaign for the whole month.

I also don't think it would have made enough of a difference alone. We didn't have any more ideas to promote Soulash in the final week of the campaign. If you've looked through my analytics stats in the first article, you might have notices the extra nine days might have resulted in maybe 4.5%, but even 0.5% per day was optimistic in the middle of the campaign. That's the realist speaking, of course, because in every one of these 9 days, an optimist could say that someone rich might have come across Soulash and decided it's the best thing in the world.

#2 Kickstarter vs. IndieGoGo

My decision to try Kickstarter was too rash. A simple google search of "kickstarter vs indiegogo" would get me across this infographic.

Source: blog.thecrowdfundingformula

It clearly shows that Kickstarter does not offer any advantage, and the "all or nothing" is not in favor of niche products. If you know that you need 10.000 EUR to finish your product, you don't need to go for all or nothing on a single platform. There are tons of options to cover the missing difference! You can get a loan, you can set up a Patreon, you can do a contract job, you can run another campaign on another platform, maybe this time localized for your country, maybe apply for a government grant or funding, you can do all sorts of things with your time and skills. If all else fails, you can reduce the scope, run early access and get funds from that pre-release.

If I knew what I know now, I would at the very least spend a couple of evenings reading through what to expect from alternatives like IndieGoGo. I would probably end up running the campaign somewhere else because getting half the goal after the campaign would have been more manageable.

Kickstarter directly helped fund around 16% of the goal, in the initial and final 48 hours only. There are ways to game the system from what I heard but seems like not much to gain from the "popular platform" when having a niche product.

#3 The goal was too high

This gets me to the 3rd mistake. It's related to #2, so I won't go deeper into that.

If I knew what I know now, I wouldn't have set the goal to 10k EUR. One way to mitigate the all or nothing is to set the absolute minimum that allows you to progress further, not what you need to finish the product. It's unclear to me if IndieGoGo would have been better. Additional research might help me answer that. If the Kickstarter turns out to be a better option still, a low initial goal and pushing more work into stretch goals would be a better choice, as people are more willing to grab copies of already funded projects to get more goodies for their bucks. Additionally, Kickstarter algorithms are preferential to funded projects for obvious reasons - Kickstarter only makes money when projects go through.

#4 Being a realist

Not committing to supporting Linux even though I want to. Indicating to some backers that Kickstarter is not all or nothing for the project during the campaign. Saying no to some features that were too big to go for in the next 2 years.

Here's the problem. I want all of these things, and I will work hard toward reaching these goals. It might break me one day, but it's stupid to dismiss these features in the marketing messaging because of some fear of commitment. The truth is, I don't know if I want to work for the next 10 to 25 years on a single game like some other roguelike developers. It's very daunting to commit your whole life like that to meet the height of games like Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, or Unreal World. Maybe in two more years, a sequel to Soulash will make much more sense than a complete rework of the existing game to fit another great feature. That's why I didn't want to commit for more than 2 years because that's how far I can see going, and being upfront about it was detrimental to the campaign.

If I knew what I know now, I would have included everything I want to make for the game, committing a timeframe to only the crucial parts like the primary goal, tier rewards, and stretch goals. I should have written that Linux support will happen if we get funded. Hell, last year, I bought Xbox Series X for Cyberpunk, and now I want to add controller support, 4K resolution support, and port Soulash to Xbox so I can enjoy it on my couch! I should have just pasted that Xbox logo on the campaign page and said it would happen one day. Don't be a realist or pessimist when doing marketing of what's to come in the future. Plans change, and player requests often change my priorities.

#5 Lack of solid plan for Reddit

Here's the complete list of subreddits we've posted about Soulash and its Kickstarter during the campaign.

/r/roguelikes - 120 upvotes

/r/games - 48 upvotes - removed due to rule break

/r/devblogs - 5 upvotes

/r/worldbuilding - 3 upvotes - removed due to rule break

/r/indiegaming - 63 upvotes

/r/kickstarter - 3 upvotes

/r/crowdfundedgames - 4 upvotes

/r/indiegames - 4 upvotes

/r/Polska (it allows game submissions) - 6 upvotes - removed due to rule break

Three posts removed, and the biggest one on /r/games might have been a significant loss, as it was picking up some steam, and it's a big subreddit. So the /r/worldbuilding was a waste of time mainly because mods are very picky, and they have to control which Kickstarters are allowed to be presented there. I posted there about the world of Soulash, and even though I removed the Kickstarter link, they were very restrictive about how I should present my world design. Overall I wouldn't recommend going there with anything.

The /r/games and /r/Polska were banned because I write too much about Soulash on my Reddit account. That's a stupid rule that only forces a workaround, but what can you do.

If I knew what I know now, I would invest time on a second Reddit account that writes posts only to get karma about some random topics so that I can leverage more restrictive subreddits like /r/games or /r/Polska.

I think these were the crucial mistakes I've made that might have affected the campaign's outcome, but overall it's difficult to know if these would have been enough. Maybe not.

What about the good stuff

Not everything I did was a mistake. The things that got me good results are also worth mentioning.

#1 Having an alpha on Itch for 2 years

It's not the same as early access on Steam, but I would say a smaller version of it. I generated some interest over two years for the ASCII alpha version of the game before the campaign. Some players decided to support the movement even though they already owned a copy of it. Many of them helped by spreading the word about the campaign. Building a community of players that enjoy your game is critical and valuable. It takes time and a lot of effort, but if you've seen the statistics in the previous article, you know how big of an impact this was. Without that support, the campaign might have ended at about 40% maybe.

To back this claim, I can point you to the Nadir Kickstarter campaign https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/167825245/nadir-an-infernal-roguelike-jrpg running parallel to Soulash. It's a game of much higher budget, team, and much higher goals that also didn't make it through. I thought the game was very cool. I even backed it. But they only reached 17% of their goal! Why? My bet is on not building a community before the campaign. From their final post, it seems they have a way forward still, so I hope they will make it in the end.

#2 Setting up the Steam page

I wish I had more time to get the demo on Steam sooner than in the middle of the campaign. And I wish I've set up the Steam page sooner. But getting it just before the campaign started was the best time to have it. During the 2 years of Soulash on Itch, the game got in 994 collections, while 4 weeks after starting the campaign, it already has 1646 wishlists on Steam. That's 64% more, and it's still growing!

#3 Tried everything I thought of

Hesitation in such situations is your enemy. It doesn't matter if an idea is as stupid as writing to /r/Polska (subreddit about Poland, my home country). They had a flag for games, so you can bet your ass I will post there. Don't overthink it, be shameless, and allow yourself to fail. If you have the time, obviously prepare better as it will make a difference. But if you've already finished what you planned, don't look at the backer counter, hoping it will tick. Try to look for more options and execute fast. The mistakes made will help prepare for the next big thing.

#4 Help other indie devs

I like to support people who work hard to achieve their goals, and I think making games is very difficult. There is very little money in this business even if you work for big companies doing AAA, the pay remains barely competitive with web dev, and have you heard about the crunch? You need to be like a freaking Leonardo Da Vinci if you want to go the indie dev route, having many different skills on a very high level. It takes years of dedication to finish something worthwhile. If you know what I'm talking about, support your fellow indie developers, especially the ones that you won't need to help you out in return. Offer them your resources just because you think they are worth it, be it retweets, likes, or even committing your little time to playtest their games. You can build relations for many years this way and support each other in your process of making games. This extends to content creators as well. At least promote their videos and articles of your game. By the way, have you played Terra Randoma already? It's an excellent roguelike on Steam, and the developer is fantastic. It has a nice discount on Steam now, you should give it a try.

I think that's it, at least for the important stuff. The grind continues, hopefully with the strength to reach the full potential of Soulash.

Thank you for reading, and don't hesitate to ask questions if I haven't covered something.