Kickstarter Staff Pick

[Lobster]

I was also very surprised seeing that Profit Colony received a staff pick when it launched. There are no screenshots on the project page. The game itself needs more clarification about what it is about and how it will be played.

Every project that launches eventually will get skimmed by the community manager designated for the category. In June 2014 it was changed to a partially automated system where projects are allowed to go live if approved by a bot that can look for keywords like "charity". A human will eventually check to make sure guidelines are not being broken. This helps reduce the problem of being stuck in approval limbo for up to 2 weeks that some campaigns faced back in 2012 and 2013.

In the past it was a much bigger achievement to get a staff pick. Good campaign execution (Especially visual presentation) and a strong story about the developers behind the campaign are what I aim for to get a staff pick. Ray's The Dead was notified it was selected for a staff pick before it even launched during its pre-launch marketing. In 2014 it became too easy to get picked in the Games category so the promotion it provides is much less.

Luke Crane is now responsible for the Games category. He did a Q&A Hangout that was posted to the official Kickstarter YouTube channel. Asking him for advice not related to staff picks may get a project noticed. Directly asking to get featured almost certainly guarantees not getting featured.

[tedder]

getting the Kickstarter seal of approval has gotten much easier in the past few months. They seem to "pick" a lot of projects now.

Generally, the quality has dropped substantially. There are great projects, but there are a TON of terrible projects. I keep wtfkickstarter.com to snark at them, and I skip some because I won't snark about mental illness and such.