So we launched a Kickstarter for "Treasure or Treachery", something I've been thinking about and planning for years. Less than halfway into it we've decided to cancel the funding, we are not getting the conversion rate we expected. Rather than spend our money and time on this iteration we've decided to re-tool and re-launch again later this year. Our presentation, pricing, and marketing plan are out of sync with the current reality of launching on Kickstarter. We need to re-examine our strategy, and improve our execution on a number of fronts if we are going to be successful here and get our first game out.
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| Launching a Kickstarter is like putting your baby in the oven |
To be frank the decision to try Kickstarting Treasure or Treachery came rather quickly after we had initially dismissed the idea to focus on developing out another game and making that our first Kickstarter instead. We reasoned this other game, which is Match Kingdom by the way, would be less costly for us to produce and we could start with a lower goal. In the end we decided there were a few problems with this and came back around to pursuing Treasure or Treachery since the game is ready for publication.
We set our goal at 25k because that would give us some additional funds to accelerate development of our next 2 games as well as market and sell the remaining stock from the Kickstarter print run, assuming we didn't sell everything out during the campaign (ha ha).
We set our timeline at 45 days because this would give us a couple weeks to tune things up and experiment with some different marketing methods, before we made a big push for the last 30 days of the campaign.
We made a video, collected some graphics, came up with some bonuses, reward tiers, even some stretch goals, just in case... Throw it in the pot, mix it up, launch and let the world know so they can beat a path to your door... annnnnd.... well mostly crickets. What happened?
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| A friendly message from Kickstarter reminds you of your failure |
We made a few big mistakes:
- We did not develop an audience first and we don't have a large budget for marketing; in other words, our marketing plan was not great. We did have a few tricks up our sleeve to get publicity, I can't talk about them now, and we did not deploy them, but in our estimation given the initial response they would not be most effective without fixing a few other things first...
- We did not have a sufficient presentation on Kickstarter, and both our game presentation and reward tier pricing were out of sync with expectations and our potential audience. To simplify this: we need a better prototype and need to be able to show a high quality end product and be priced in parity with similar offerings.
- We thought it would be easier to get fewer backers at a higher price point, reasoning that some extras, exclusivity, and the Kickstarter community would be enough. Well, this might have worked if we had a top notch presentation with a lot of cool parts and some brand recognition. Hubris! We don't have all the cool parts, we are new and have no brand recognition, nobody knows who we are yet.
- Our funding goal was too high and our stretch goals were tacked on. We need to perform some deeper analysis here and align our goals and expectations with what's reasonably achievable for us at this stage. We've got some great feedback from friends, family, and strangers and are incorporating that into our efforts.
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| Had to draw a Fate card! |
So what's next? Well a few things...
We are working on re-tooling the whole thing so we can re-launch later this year. New artwork, a better final product, and a Kickstarter campaign that is in sync with similar games being successfully funded. We will continue to develop new games: I Bet You Can't, and Match Kingdom being the current ones but we've got a bunch more in the lab.
I'm going to keep blogging here about what we are doing, our successes, failures, stuff we are planning, things we suck at, things we do great at, and game development in general. We'll be posting on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and working on connecting with fans of pirates, board games, party games, kids games, and video games and hopefully some game developers, manufacturers, publishers, guilds, hobby stores, cafes, etc. etc...
We are also working on additional marketing and a better marketing strategy and execution to build awareness and drive backers to our next campaign.
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