[This article was originally written by Michael Elwin of Artoncode Studio.]
When it comes to choosing a crowdfunding platform for game projects, Kickstarter is indisputably the number one choice for most (if not all) developers and game studios. There have been many success stories, with several high-profile projects receiving backing from their supporters to the tune of a million dollars or more.
Although there are incidents such as cancelled and unsuccessful crowdfunding campaigns, delayed projects, or even projects that deviated from the original campaign, many people still flock to the platform to fund new ideas and creative projects.
For our very own crowdfunding campaign (Winterflame: The Other Side), we had to evaluate many considerations on how to fund the development of our latest project. What helped us finally decide on Kickstarter was the data from Shopify's infographics on crowdfunding campaigns.
It showed us that Kickstarter is still the most viable platform to run crowdfunding campaign compared to other platforms for all indie developers around the world. However, Kickstarter does not support payment processing in Indonesia yet (as stated in the Kickstarter creator guidelines). Hence, running a campaign from Indonesia does pose a whole different set of challenges for our studio, Artoncode.
Artoncode is a relatively new, independent game development studio based in Jakarta, Indonesia. Founded in 2012, we released a couple of local mobile games like Faunia Rancher, Faunia Paw, and a children's karaoke app, Harmoni. In 2013 we acquired the rights to develop Vandaria, which is a huge open source (at that time) fantasy IP for Indonesia with lots of followers. As an IP itself, Vandaria already has a number of novels, card and flash games under its franchise.
The Winterflame project itself started as a novel project, which was set in an area that has never been touched on before in other novels, thus we had the freedom to create whole new interesting things for the world. This game started as an idea for a small game to promote the novels, but with time, the game became a lot more ambitious and the tale that is told for the game began to run parallel to the Winterflame novel.
Thus Winterflame: The Other Side was born. It is a puzzle adventure game that makes use of magic elements as the main gameplay to solve puzzles. It was planned as a premium title, build from the ground up with Unity 5 and is targeted to be released on Steam in 2016.
The game creates the background story for the world of Vandaria by using Lev's story. It came up while we were in serious talks about creating this game midway through last year and while the novel was midway in development. Lev's story fills in the missing gaps; questions one might have while exploring Vandaria's world, and also develops the origins of the magic and the world. This ultimately is the catalyst that starts Lev on his journey.
We showed the very first prototype in the Indonesia Game Show. In the booth, while promoting the IP, novel, and the game, Winterflame gathered substantial interest from visitors and participants of the event. Everyone who saw it and got their hands on the prototype were amazed and couldn't wait for the game to be released.
The next positive reaction was from GDC 2015. While we were there, even though we didn't have a booth specifically for Winterflame, we were able to garner even more attention because of the quality we were planning to achieve, especially where artwork was concerned. We showed the game merely through trailers and booklets to whom we thought were key people at the time. Both these events gave us confidence for the project and to run a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for Winterflame: The Other Side.
After a year of preparation and discussion, Winterflame: The Other Side's Kickstarter campaign was launched on April 20th, 2015 for 40 days. It concluded with $79,832 CAD - just a slight 4% over the initial goal of $68,000 CAD. In short, we made it! But not without our share of challenges. Hence we'd like to share what we've learned so far in this article.
Why We Used Crowdfunding
We resorted to crowdfunding while bearing in mind that being 100% dependent on Kickstarter funds is a big NO. Hence, we also made efforts to raise our own funds for the project. At the same time, having a successful crowdfunding campaign would also prove that many people like and approve of the game's concept and genre.
Campaign Results
We achieved 20% of our goal quite easily within the first week, thanks to our friends, family, and colleagues in the Indonesian game and media industries. However, the pledges stagnated for the two weeks that followed, only to pick up after we improved our campaign on the fly.
During the Campaign: An Analysis
Running a Kickstarter campaign from Indonesia was actually quite difficult.
Being an indie developer from Indonesia, Kickstarter proved to be a really big hurdle for us to overcome. This puts us in a tough spot. While we decided to run the campaign on Kickstarter, not being able to draw the funds would have crippled us quite significantly.
After pondering our situation, we decided to list down potential people, reliable people, with whom to entrust the funds raised. In doing so, we found willing help from a team member's relative in Canada. This is the reason why the fundraiser campaign was in CAD instead of USD as originally planned.
Another thing that made our Kickstarter campaign difficult was calculating the pricing for the physical rewards, especially when the price of shipping had to be taken into account. While sending goods to Indonesia is relatively easy and cheap, the reverse is not so. Particularly where trying to keep it affordable is concerned.
The only viable option to ship goods outside of Indonesia is using EMS (Express Mail Services), which is quick (about 4-7 days to the U.S.) but extremely expensive. Other means include using 'private' services such as FedEx, UPS, or DHL, which are equally quick and secure, but all the more expensive (40 USD for something like a t-shirt sent to the U.S.).
We were eventually able to find a solution for this that involved a combination of two methods; producing goods in the U.S. and shipping it directly from there, and sending all the goods produced in Indonesia to the U.S. via bulk shipment and have it distributed from there.
Late Audience Build Up
Being a relatively new studio to the world, we didn't do what 'marketing 101' suggests, which is to build an audience and fanbase for our product prior to the campaign. Sure, Vandaria as an IP itself has a recorded forty-thousand fans IN Indonesia.
However, credit card usage in Indonesia amounts to less than 3% of the entire population, and the term 'crowd-funding' (let alone 'kickstarter') is relatively unknown to the majority of its people. These factors rendered Vandaria's massive fanbase insufficient; even with the majority of the backers coming from Indonesia (about 40%), it wasn't enough, though we are nonetheless extremely grateful to those who contributed to our campaign.
So, we first did our best to connect with our backers. Despite the time zone differences, we made the extra effort replying to messages, emails and questions almost immediately, and spent the time personally thanking each pledger.
Then, we redesigned our updates so we could interact with our fans. We had them vote for designs and ask questions that would generate more buzz for the game. What resulted was a community, and with this we found that people are looking to support and give to the things that they like.
Bigger Campaigns Appeared in May
In early May 2015 there were three major campaigns dominating the media. These are:
- Starfighter (from the creator of X-Wing and Tie Fighter)
- Yooka-Laylee (ex-developers from Rare, and creators of Donkey Kong Country)
- Bloodstained (from the legendary Koji Igarashi of Castlevania fame)
After dominating the front pages of nearly every gaming press web site online (for several weeks even), these three campaigns alone partly contributed (though definitely not to blame for it) in us getting...
Almost No International Media Coverage
Of course we felt that we were overshadowed by those three huge crowdfunding campaigns (and we are certain that we're not alone in feeling that way). We even heard back from a journalist who went as far as to say "we only cover Kickstarter campaigns from famous people". This is while not forgetting the fact that being late in marketing our campaign also caused us to be large 'ignored' by the general media.
We even heard back from a journalist who went as far as to say "we only cover Kickstarter campaigns from famous people".
With all the media hype about those great games and their success in getting funded, admittedly, we were losing hope in achieving a successful Kickstarter campaign.
We DID try to make personal contact over and over again, but we were either ignored or the emails were 'lost in the sea' of what the media normally gets. No one is to blame for this, but not getting any media coverage was a big blow to us.
Our good relationship with the local gaming media helped tremendously. We received plenty of attention from people following our work on local news sites such as duniaku.net, gamesinasia, kotakgame and others.
We were also very active on Twitter throughout the entire crowdfunding campaign. Every time there was an update we would tweet about it, doing our best to interact with people who mentioned or retweeted about our game; we ended up being covered by a couple of YouTubers who we communicated with on Twitter.
Late Getting into Steam Greenlight
Based on our research and when we met with other, more experienced publishers at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, we were told that Steam Greenlight would not affect our campaign too much. It would also cause the workload to be split, since we would have to maintain two campaigns at once.
In the end, we realized that we could have started the Steam Greenlight process WAY BEFORE Kickstarter to avoid that issue. Nonetheless, by putting it up there we'd have a platform to interact with the Steam gaming community.
We entered Steam Greenlight two weeks after the start of our Kickstarter campaign (which was a bit late!) But we were lucky that we had plenty of votes and support, and our game was greenlit within a week. At that time our yes / no ratio on Steam was at 60% / 32% with eight percent choosing 'maybe'. Lots of people were cheering us on, which was just what we needed for a confidence boost. Being Greenlit allowed us to have a stronger marketing factor, and connect us with our potential buyers and fans on Steam.
No Copywriters
While our team is good (and we do have a couple of good writers), at the end of the day, they are INDONESIAN writers. Even though our English writing and speaking skills are above average, it is not our native language, and we lack the creativity in using the language properly.
The end result was a wall of text that was disjointed and full of grammatical errors. What was written was not something a person from an English-speaking country would immediately understand. At the end of the campaign a close friend gave a very frank comment which was absolutely heartbreaking to us: "I don't understand what the hell you guys were trying to explain. I just supported it because (we're friends and) it's YOUR campaign".
However, we were lucky enough to have people from Ace Ed-Venture, our Malaysian partner, go over the text suggesting fixes and rewrites.
We went from this:
"Go against all odds with Lev, the handicapped boy, in this hideously beautiful puzzle-adventure game."
To this:
"What if the act of saving a loved one leads to the uncovering of a distorted truth? Would you be willing to take the plunge and have your perceptions challenged?"
The final rewrite helped in convincing potential backers. Even many of our team members loved it, as they felt the new writeup was quite 'magical'.
It is apparent that the correct use of language is very important to potential backers. We initially thought a great video was the most important part of the campaign. While that remains true the write up is ALSO just as important, complementing the video to form the building blocks of a successful campaign.
(we'd imagine a wall of poorly written Indonesian text would annoy us too.)
No Coherent Gameplay Information
We always intended for Winterflame: The Other Side to be a project that was steeped in a rich story, so we focused on that. What we forgot along the way was that we were trying to launch a game, not a movie or a novel.
The only gameplay information we provided was that:
- it's a puzzle adventure game
- it had four elements, which were key to solving the puzzles
We didn't show or illustrate 'how' these elements would work. We had it in the video at the end, but discovered that we should have shown it much earlier. We also neglected to illustrate the gameplay elements in the writeup.
The light at the end of the tunnel appeared after we released a demo featuring one of the elements, a week after the campaign started. From there we received generally positive feedback from the public. We also had YouTubers creating gameplay videos of our demo, further increasing our discoverability. Thankfully, they understood that it was only a prototype, since the demo had a lot of problems that had yet to be addressed.
Lengthy Initial Video
When we were story-boarding the initial video, we wanted our CEO, producer, concept artist, and IP creator to have a say in it. Especially since among the four of them, two were involved heavily in the critically-acclaimed puzzle adventure Loondon. In the end, there was just too much input. The video ended up being more than five minutes long, and only 20% of our viewers watched it till the end.
This meant that they didn't see the most important part of the video: the gameplay footage.
When we decided to put our game up on Steam Greenlight, we shortened the video considerably. We removed all the "creators" segments from the video and it was shortened substantially from more than five minutes to around two minutes and thirty seconds.
The number of people who watched our video until the end also increased from 20% to 28%. It also positively impacted the number of pledges we've received.
Mass E-Mail Tool Fail
We always knew we would have to send a bunch of emails to our relatives, families, acquaintance, and media outlets. That's why we were shopping for tools that can help us achieve this and make our lives easier. But nowadays, with all the spam protection and auto filters, most of these emails end up in spam folders, getting filed under Gmail's 'Promotion' tab for example, where they are largely ignored.
We found out about this when we met one of our acquaintances at Casual Connect Singapore on May 2015 (when we showed him our game). He was surprised that he missed our e-mails, and it turned out that the e-mails were stuck in the spam folders.
From here, we learnt (the hard way) that the emails sent to the people that you want support from have to be personal. It may seem like a lot of work, sending those hundreds of emails. But in the end, those hundreds of emails (thousands of emails even) are totally worth sending out. It's not something that a couple of people wouldn't do for the success of a crowdfunding campaign.
We need to remember that Kickstarter is a community of people who are eager to back a project, no matter how big or small. One way to gain backers is by collaborating on a cross-promotion with other project creators. That kind of promotion worked for us tremendously.
The biggest cross promotion effort we pursued was when we met with the people who ran the Bloodstained campaign (by chance) at Casual Connect Singapore 2015. When they agreed to collaborate with us, backers started pouring in. After the mention, our pledges were about $1,200 CAD on average per day.
The Take Away in Marketing Our Game (and Running a Successful Kickstarter Campaign)
Winterflame: The Other Side is a project that is very well thought-out, and very beautifully, meticulously designed. People who have seen the designs are always interested in finding out more about the project. The problem lies with discoverability. And it doesn't matter how beautifully-crafted your projects are, or even how well thought-out it is. When people CAN'T see them, they're not given the opportunity to buy into your idea and pledge for your campaign on Kickstarter or any other platform.
The Artoncode Team