We talk about my current studio’s Kickstarter for the Shadow’s Kiss MMO, and all the ups and downs of the emotional ride associated with it.
Shadow’s Kiss is the third Kickstarter I’ve participated in. The first was the lovely but ill-fated Niftymancer, and the second was on the highly successful Crowfall (although I wasn’t running point on that one, and mostly got to see the stress and tumult on my teammates who were in the middle of it).
Like many Kickstarters, we had basically shut down our studio for a month to prep. You need a full media plan, a fully realized pitch, a solid set of art assets, and a thick skin ready to go for launch day.
In launching a Kickstarter, you are testing one principal assumption: do you have enough of a fanbase to meet your goal? As I discovered with Niftymancer (wide eyed and naïve at the time), Kickstarter does not bring you a fanbase. Rather, it is a chance to ask your fanbase to step up, and to actually turn passion into crowdfunding. Learning from that prior mistake, we spent two and a half years building a fanbase, on Facebook, on Patreon, and even going out to events like PAX South.
Thankfully, we hit our initial goal in a single day (technically it was in the first 36 hours, since I started the Kickstarter after midnight). That did not, however, mean that the emotional roller coaster was over.
To start with, you have the basic stress of getting your updates out (we planned a new video or art drop every day). Then you have the massive circuit of begging friends for pledges. Even small pledges help, so you don’t need to shake everyone down for big cash (although big backers are always nice), but it still takes a certain amount of pride swallowing to send those missives.
Then there are the days when you find yourself in the doldrums. This comes with the territory, of course, but checking every hour only to find your campaign hasn’t moved, or worse, that there were some cancellations that set you back. It can be quite the downer.
Finally, we’re in the realm of vampire games, and despite the absolute abundance of vampires in both video games (Vampyr) and popular culture (True Blood, Lost Boys, Twilight, The Strain, etc.), there is that occasional toxic fan that is convinced you are stealing word for word from some prior vampire property, and that you must die in a fire for your sins. (Some day I expect I’ll make a game about wizards, and I’ll have those same toxic fans telling my that J.K. Rowling owns the rights to all things with the word “wizard” or “witch” in them). Obviously, you want to turn people into allies, and you want to show grace and respect for the sake of the 99.9% of the fanbase that is cool and respectful and glad that you’re making your game. Still, I think it’s what Starr Long referred to as the “crying in the shower” part of crowd funding. Sometimes the pathos is a bit much.
At the end of the day, though, you look at the progress of a successful Kickstarter and take some time to congratulate yourself on making it this far. You *do* have a fanbase, and you *do* have a concept for a game that people want to play. Market validation is awesome.
I’m going to close here. Check out our Kickstarter for Shadow’s Kiss at:
Next time we’ll talk about our guerilla marketing and audience building!
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