BackerClub Forums

Impact Winter
A post-apocalyptic survival adventure set upon the remnants of a buried Earth.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mo ... act-winter

I quickly skimmed the campaign and the data I have for it.

The project reached 22.4% of its goal. £21,270 is about $33,500 USD. That funding goal of £95,000 was the equivalent of about $149,800 USD which is not small. Raising over 15% means a reboot should be at least considered at a better time in 2015.

I like the pitch video. It is 2 minutes long, is well put together and builds the atmosphere. The art is strong with some very good looking page graphics.

Here is a graph of the performance of its reward tiers.
http://i.imgur.com/mjixo0u.png

The £6 tier was an early-bird copy. That explains why it plateaus in the "Backers by tier over time" graph. What is very noteworthy is that the £12 tier holds 189 more backers than the 268 at the £9 tier. That looks like a good job up-selling. The drop in backers to the £15 tier is acceptable and this continues to the £60 tier. The £12 tier also brought in the most allocated funding at 32.72%. I like it.

There is a gap in the rewards between the £60 and £125 tiers that could have had tiers inserted to try to be a little bit better at covering funding distance. There are not any other big problems with the rewards that I see.

The per backer average pledge amount was £13.92 (About $22 USD) which is on the lower end of what I consider healthy. This does not mean it was a bad average. Unallocated backers that did not select any reward tier was at a good low. It would need to aim for around 5,000 to 7,000 backers to reach 100% funded.

Exposure within Kickstarter was not a problem as it was well ranked. It actually would pop up into the top 4 positions. It launched and ended on acceptable days. Ending at a later hour would have brought in more funding, but that extra would be insignificant compared to the funding distance remaining.

The number of comments per day feels too low for a campaign with 1,528 backers. This could indicate lack of engagement between project creator and backers. Project updates were not as large as some other campaigns have. Updates did provide good video material.

I do regular searches about Kickstarter-related news. The Imgur post only has 832 views when I'm posting this. Bitly anlytics for the project showed most of the shortlink sharing was on October 8th when it launched and on October 24th. After October 31st the daily numbers dropped off. There was no surge at the end. From the 985 Facebook shares I am assuming Facebook was most, or at least a big portion, of the shortlink sharing. I did not see Impact Winter on Rock Paper Shotgun or Kotaku. That is where many backers can come from. There was some coverage by small to medium sized blogs. It may be a boring answer, but it looks like what might of killed the campaign was problems with their marketing not being large enough for such a large minimum goal. I was not following this campaign closely, so there may be other factors that I am not aware of.

Something project creators should know before launching is a rough estimate for how many backers they are going to have to get to reach 100%. That provides a sense of how much work is going to be required just to get those backers. It also increases the importance of getting people aware of a project before it launches so they can pledge on the first day. A project may have to delay launching until it has enough of a following to give it the first week momentum it needs to get fully funded.

What I see skimming it is a game idea that could maybe do $70,000 or a little less than half of what they were asking for. When I make such estimates they are often a bit pessimistic, but not by much. Any higher would require more to show and even better execution. For games where atmosphere is important a demo is something I recommend having. I am not a fan of asking for less than production will require, so to get the minimum goal lower would usually require scope reductions like breaking the game into episodes.

I was an early-bird backer on their previous campaign Gametron 1000. On that old project with 337 backers the last update was January 20th 2013. I would have made a project update alerting backers on that old project to check out their new game with a project preview link. This would potentially have boosted the first day more for the launch of Impact Winter.

Now knowing that gameplay footage and some of those screenshots came much later, I can see how the project page would be weaker. I was not excited enough to pledge when I saw it launch.

I feel it is very important backers know who is behind the project. There have been incidents in crowdfunding where people launch projects for something that isn't theirs. I do not recall it happening for a video game yet, but one example I remember was a Bluetooth tracker tag.

Something I recommend project creators do is actually have a project update explaining how the controls are currently mapped to the keyboard/mouse or gamepad. There is then information such as how tapping an action button would do one thing, but that same button held for 2 seconds does another thing. If a developer doesn't even know how players will control their game then it may be a bit too early for a Kickstarter campaign. For some games it is easy because the genre has well established mappings.

Back in 2012 a concept for a game with some contracted art could get funded. Now backers are more experienced and want to see real effort put into the game itself.