Post-mortem: Divine Space on Kickstarter.com

Instead of a foreword

Here I will not talk about why we ended up on Kickstarter - I talked about this in a previous article . I also do not plan to draw graphs, pour in wagons of numbers and more. All this is in similar post-mortem. Now I want to share my experience and tell what in my humble opinion went wrong and why the campaign did not raise the required amount. The amount is small for Kickstarter, only $ 100,000.

One third of the target amount

It would seem Divine Spacecollected only a third and the success of the campaign was very far away. However, this is not at all true. In fact, the difference is only a few percent of visitors converting to beckers. Our conversion was about 3.2%, a good conversion, which would be enough for us to achieve the goal - 5-6%. Chic conversion of top-end projects - 12-13%, according to the authors of the projects. The logical question is: “but then would you have collected only twice as much?” And the answer to it would be: no. The audience of Kikstarer is very sensitive to the general mood and if he sees that there are more and more backers and the amount is not growing slowly, the project has not reached a plateau, then their number and payments are increasing. At the end, the conversion decreased to 2.6%, which is natural: the project does not collect, they look at it but do not support it. In the case of successful projects, the picture is exactly the opposite,



Each missing conversion percentage has arisen (or disappeared, as you wish) for a reason, but for obvious reasons. I want to talk about them here so that you, dear reader, would bypass this rake. The most interesting thing is that these reasons are not related to the game itself or its quality. No, just the quality of the game itself, art, setting, even that scanty rudiment of gameplay that we showed - all this was accepted by the target audience with a bang. But at the same time, there were serious, critical minuses in the "parameters" of the project, which, unfortunately, were not in my power to change.

Problem # 1: video and editing

The video was supposed to be not only original, but also entertaining. The figures in the hoods were conceived as an allegory of many similar scenes in science fiction films with a hint of villains publishers who, according to many players, rive endless clones and farms. In the original idea, various funny moments were planned - glowing eyes, smoke from the mouth, Darth Vader's hands and so on. Unfortunately, the creators of our film simply did not have enough time and energy for this. In addition, as he wrote in a previous article, we did not have time to rehearse, as a result of which we look on the video rather miserably and funnyly. That is, the funny thing was not the video, but we. Alas, funny not in a good way, such as Charlie Chaplin or Tim Shafer in his video, where he is funny and charming. Being ridiculous in the video does not contribute to the confidence of the backers in the team.

What absolutely everyone noticed is the discrepancy between speech and lips. In my opinion, this is exactly what made the video inoperative. The viewer did not believe what was happening on the screen, did not believe in us, and, as a result, did not believe in our project. Without exaggeration, I can say that I received at least two hundred reviews that we have "the most monstrous montage in the world, and the speech does not correspond to the lips."

Problem # 2: target platform

The biggest problem with the campaign (and the project as a whole) is that it was developed first for the iPad. I was initially opposed, but I was convinced that "it will be a small game for trial." Guilty, fool, I’ll correct myself.

It was an absolute failure to reach the target audience, which is currently being formed on Kickstarter. It was a miss past the audience of space games. It was a spit in the face of all lovers of role-playing games. Moreover, it was a hit on a painful point by players who are not just not interested in games for tablets, but have a very negative attitude towards them. Never before have I received so much negativity from players, right down to open insults and ridicule in the forums. The main idea of ​​the mass today, “such a game can not be good on tablets” and “you do something kutsee, as always on mobile phones, and try to us, serious players and fans of space games, to get it!”.

I know what games on tablets will look like in a year or two, but our target audience is not game developers. These are ordinary people who cannot predict the future in this way. They live in the present day and in this context they are absolutely right. Similar games compared to what they like, tiny, scanty and uninteresting. Loud claims that the Divine Space is an AAA title for tablets have contributed to their even greater fury. Divine Space aroused doubts among the players about the normality of the developers, since in their opinion, “PS is always done first, and then it is ported to mobile phones”. In some ways they are right. I believe that the version for the PS would have been released.

In summary, I can say the following. Your target audience should LOVE your project, then everything will be fine. If there is something that annoys them, then it will definitely play. If you assume that this or that property of your project will not please the target audience, do everything possible to get rid of it. Because even if only 10% of people do not want to support your project because of this, you can lose much more than 10% of the amount collected.

Problem # 3: fremium (free-to-play)

Fremium (aka free-to-play, free-toplay) is the third nail driven into the coffin of the campaign, but right into her heart. Thanks to the many games in which this (beautiful in theory) model has turned into a pay-to-play or pay-to-win, many players sincerely hate it. For those who do not know what it is: these are games that can be downloaded or installed for free, but in which especially valuable items are sold for money. Especially evil and cynical games sell energy, without which the players involved in the process cannot continue to play and are forced to pay. In the case of pay-to-win in games, such conditions are created that players in almost no way can pass certain levels without paying the game. In especially difficult cases in multiplayer games, those who pay get a huge advantage over non-paying players and turn them into meat. It so happened that most players who hate free-to-play were our target audience. In other words, they are willing to pay for copies of games, they are willing to pay hundreds and thousands of dollars in support of projects they are interested in, but they are not ready to pay for free-to-play games. Of course, not all players are like that, otherwise we would not have collected a third of the required amount.

That we had this problem, we knew. But even I could not imagine its entire size, especially after working with Russian players, more or less loyal to freemium. Maybe freemium would work for some other games with a different target audience, I admit that (the same farms or cityville).

Problem # 4: lack of ability to buy / pre-order a game

This problem arises from the previous one, and, I believe, this is the biggest drawback of this project. The Fremium model deprived the campaign of the opportunity to offer players a copy of the game for half its value (or slightly less / more). Most of the backers pay mainly in order to pre-order a copy of the game they like at a huge discount, and get a bunch of different bonuses on top. The main thing for everyone, as before, remains a copy of the game, which they otherwise will not receive, or will still buy, but at a much higher price. In our case, the fremium model creates a situation in which players will receive the game for free. And a huge number of them have a reasonable question: “Why should I pay now, if I already get it for free? Bonuses are great, of course, but the main bonus is a free game! ” Or "Let others pay for me, I will play when the game comes out."

Consider Lost Conversion

Returning to the conversion. Now you can roughly guess and calculate what we lost by running the campaign in this form. As I wrote above, our conversion was at the level of 3%, then increasing to 3.5%, then decreasing to 2.8%. My assessment is based solely on personal experience and a vision of how other projects work, comparing hundreds of campaigns and dozens of different statistics on viewing and conversions. You can agree or disagree with me, but the assessment is as follows:

In the video and in the absence of synchronization, we lost very little, about 0.25% -0.3%. On the platform, at least 1.25%, on fremium, at least 0.75%, and on the absence of a paid copy of the game, at least 1%.

The higher the percentage of people screened out by the flaws (or properties) of the project, the higher your lost income. And most importantly, the dependence here is not linear, but exponential (or according to a similar schedule): for example, 10% of fallen backers will reduce your fees by 10%, and 15% will reduce the profitability of your campaign by 20% and so on. Of course, these figures are arbitrary and for different campaigns they will be different, but the essence is just that. Conversely, the higher your initial conversion, the higher your campaign fees. That is why at the very beginning I wrote that the difference is not $ 60 thousand, but only a few percent. And that is why everyone who went through Kickstarter says: "your first days should show very good results and powerful growth, then your campaign will be successful" or "do not start until you are sure that your first days will be very successful."

That is, together with this “cumulative antibonus”, our conversion losses are roughly not 3.3%, but all 4-4.5%. That is, I’m sure that with different campaign settings, our conversion would be at least 7% and by the end (in the last two or three days) would increase to 9-10%. This would be more than enough to successfully achieve the goal.

Lack of a clear campaign launch date

Until the very last days, I can’t get a clear answer when we start the campaign. The answer came suddenly and it’s like “starting now or as soon as possible”. This deprived me of any opportunity to do the so-called warm-start when press releases with a clear launch date are sent out. This gives the press the opportunity to study the project, prepare articles or reviews, ask developers questions. Unfortunately, the press releases "we are making the game and will be launched on Kickstarter ... someday, probably this month ... or maybe next ..." do not work. There was practically no heating, with the exception of some preliminary agreements with small publications (they all wrote about us, thank you very much for that).

This affected the number of views / visits of the project: it turned out to be a record low for 44 days:


The lack of a warm start did not affect the conversion, it affected the low number of views: only 19.943. It is very, very small. For example, Legends of Eisenwald generated 46 thousand views and collected $ 83 thousand. Moreover, the average payment in Legends was $ 30, while in Divine Space - $ 53. That is, again, even with the same low number of views and the "right" conversion, we already (presumably) collected about $ 74 thousand. If we take into account that mass viewing also works when viewing (the more they’re backing, the more they write and the more views; the more views, the more backers and the more they write), then the target amount would be reached. This is a vicious circle, it can work for you or against you, depending on your project.

The ratio of beckers “living” on Kickstarter and “newcomers”. In fact, it is 1 to 1, but the balance of power was changed by the backer, who supported the project in the amount of $ 5000.

Alone in the field

I had to do absolutely everything, except for illustrations. This means working with the press and texts, communicating with backers and the community, working with forums (more than three hundred), coordinating the backers who helped us, monitoring statistics, writing and translating updates, editing videos, and much, much more. It is very difficult to do this alone and there is simply not enough time for much. We have not received publications in the "big" press, and I believe that it is for this reason. In addition, when the whole team is engaged in something else (as my former partners have now decided), it very demotivates. That is, if you are doing a project, but only you are interested in Kickstarter, and your team or partners are not in the same boat with you ... I do not advise spending your time on such an activity.

I would also like to thank two people for their constant support (both moral and technical, work with texts and the press) throughout the campaign. This is Rinat Bakiev (whom I met in our group “ Russians on Kickstarter”Facebook) and Thomas Watson. I don’t even know how I met Thomas, it somehow happened by itself after the launch of the campaign and I think I was very lucky. If such people appear in your project - you are lucky, appreciate them. Not as advertising, but as advice: in our group there are many people who are interested in crowdfunding and are ready to join different projects, sometimes they ask me to recommend someone. If you need an ally, then a better place than our group, for today I do not know. Like-minded people who will unload you at least a little and support you in difficult times are priceless. No kidding.

And at the same time, cut off people who promise help and support, but when the time comes they do nothing. They will spend not only your time, but what you entrust to them will not be done on time. So, for example, it happened with Russian-language forums, where out of three hundred, God forbid, about ten wrote about us

And yet...

Despite the fact that the audience had practically no reason to support us (and there were serious reasons for NOT supporting us), we collected a rather large amount. This means that the project was really good. Throughout the campaign, I received many excellent reviews from colleagues who, over the course of several decades of work in the industry, have achieved much more than I (so far). One of the letters sounded something like this: “I am surprised that you have collected so much. The game for the iPad, and even free-to-play - I thought you would collect much less, despite the fact that your video game is just great. Why, why aren't you doing it for PS? ”But if someone says that they were just compliments ...

Fail? No, this is an incredible success!

I received three offers to buy the project and / or the whole team. One sounded something like this: "In principle, it doesn’t matter to you how much you cost, we agree."

The second, much more interesting offer I received from one of the world leaders in the gaming industry (today it is primarily mobile games). For obvious reasons, I won’t say what kind of company this is, but I haven’t received any better offers so far. In addition to fully financing the entire project, raising salaries to all employees to a normal level, management was well aware of what Divine Space was. How long will the development take, what amount is actually needed for a full release. The company took on all the marketing and promotion. I guaranteed that Divine Space will appear in the top of mobile applications on the launch day (and, following their successes, I have no doubt about that). Omitting all the details, I estimated my personal benefit after two or three years (after certain events) at $ 1.2 - 1.5 million.

The third proposal was simply to buy all the rights and the team from my partners (and probably from me too) and continue development.

Why did it happen so? Because they learned about us. During the kickstare campaign, I was able to show the project, its strengths, my vision of the future of mobile games and what they will be in a few years. There is no self-promotion or boasting. If your campaign on Kikstar and its analogue is active, it is updated every 2-3 days, you turn the mountains so that everything works out for you, then they will know about you and notice you. And if your project is really promising, you will not be lost. Or not?

Success! .. No, this is the maximum epic file in the igrostroy

The partners with whom I worked refused all offers, purchase proposals did not even begin to be considered. The reasons seemed to me ridiculous, unfounded and not professional, but I will not voice them here for ethical reasons. I can only say that to shave off such an offer, which probably all small developers dream of ... it's just unbelievable. It was a great opportunity to work with professionals, who probably have hundreds of games on their account. Learn, gain experience. Yes, I would have to put my pride far away, but such an experience costs much more. And from a financial point of view, this proposal was what startups get once in a lifetime. For me, probably the most important thing is not lost material wealth, namely the opportunity to learn how to do business from those who do it best in our industry.

What was the alternative? Divine Space is gone. I don’t know if it will be thawed, and it’s unlikely that I will continue to produce it in this case. What kind of game would it be without me? It may be good, but absolutely it will not be Divine Space and not what I so persistently created.

So all the same epic fail?

Not. Despite the epic nature of this last file, for me the campaign as a whole is more than successful. She gave me incredible experience and many contacts that only at the end of the campaign began to work. I met with reporters and PR managers; stars of the gaming industry, who raised several million dollars on Kickstarter and with talented teams, raised $ 200-500 thousand. I found out what is valued primarily in the video, how to make it as tasty and popular as possible. I learned that it is not necessary to spend time and effort, that it is not worth the effort that I spent on them. I met with beckers and in practice saw which awards they needed and interesting, and which won’t work. Therefore, while crowdfunding is growing and developing, while it remains popular, I will move in this direction.

I am currently working on three projects that are likely to appear on Kickstarter (or some other site). Two of them are gaming, I’m just forming a team of one now. The third is directly related to crowdfunding and aims to solve the problems that I encountered during my own campaign. It is too early to disclose details, but I hope that thanks to this project, small teams (including domestic ones) that have started with good projects will significantly increase their chances of success and press coverage.

I wish you all success in the turbulent sea of ​​crowdfunding and I hope that this post-mortem will prove to be useful even if you do not make a game, a game for tablets or mobile phones, or a game with freemium.

As always, special thanks for pointing out errors, typos, and inaccuracies.