A few musings on Kickstarter

It's been a bit quiet around here, which is at least partially because of the fact that the day of Scions On A Plane has been literally the only day of gaming I've gotten to participate in the new year.  There are plans for International TableTop Day, though, so hopefully that'll get things going again.

In the meantime, I'm just going to jot down some of my musings on Kickstarter campaigns, based on what I've seen working and the campaigns I've chosen not to back.  I'll go over a few categories of what I look at in a Kickstarter and talk about what usually entices me and what doesn't.  Right up front I'll say that I often first inspect a campaign based on the product offered, but the product offered has yet to overcome my apathy if I'm seeing things that I dislike about the project.  I'll list the projects I've backed, but I'm going to leave out specific names of ones I've chosen not to back, since I don't want to directly harm their chances of getting other backers.

Price Point

One of the most important things I've seen about how I interact with campaigns on Kickstarter is that I need to feel like I am getting value for the money I'm pledging.  If the initial reward tier is too high, then I virtually never pledge, especially if I'm considering a project that I've got no prior experience with.  Low as the price point sounds, it seems like $10 is about where I need to feel like I'm getting some reward even if it isn't the full version of the product.  I backed Dresden Codak, where I get a PDF for $10; Artisan Dice, where $7 nets a die; Fate Core, giving a PDF at $10; and Werewolf 20th Anniversary, with a wallpaper at $10.  The outlier is Zombicide Season 2, where the first reward was at $50; in that instance I already owned Zombicide Season 1 and had friends who participated in the first Zombicide Kickstarter.  I pledged more than the minimum on them all, but I feel that the reasonable minimum was a contributing factor in my choice to pledge.

In the projects I've chosen to skip over, the lowest pledge at which I gained a reward was $14 dollars.  More typically, I've found rewards starting at $25, $40, or $50.  In a few rare cases I've looked at projects at where the initial reward was over $150!  Obviously some design projects need that high of an initial level, but I think it puts them at a distinct disadvantage from the start.  I've seen some of the projects where high pledge levels are important for getting actual products made get around the need a for a high "first" pledge by offering things like t-shirts and schematics for lesser pledge levels (and this is somewhat the Werewolf Kickstarter did).

Funding Goal

In a lot of ways, the funding goal is even more important than the price point to me.  In order from lowest to highest, the campaigns I've backed were Fate Core ($3000 goal), Artisan Dice ($9000), Zombicide Season 2 ($25000), Dresden Codak ($30000), and Werewolf 20th Anniversary ($85000).  These campaigns also all managed to hit their funding goals at a rapid pace.  Many of the Kickstarters I've chosen not to back have had goals upwards of $150000.  While there are certainly projects that do require that sort of funding, I've found that many Kickstarters which might not need such high goals (a single RPG game book, a figure carrying case, production of cooking sauces) aim for these lofty goals.

My sense in this case is that when the Kickstarter is designed to reach for "just enough" to fund a project they set these lower funding goals and when they're aiming for enough to produce the Kickstarter and then gain mass release outside the campaign, too.  While that's probably the better business decision on paper, I think it often does not actually pay off as those campaigns go unfunded where campaigns with lower goals have far more success and pull in the extra funding that would enable them to seek broader release.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the campaigns with higher funding goals are also those with higher initial pledge levels.

Stretch Goals

Stretch goals are vitally important.  They're not a requirement on Kickstarter, but they are a fairly common aspect of virtually every campaign on the site.  Most Kickstarter campaigns are long affairs, lasting over 30 days.  Stretch goals keep people considering a higher pledge level and serve as extra incentive to woo individuals who are undecided into pledging.  In looking back at the campaigns I've backed, Dresden Codak has 26 stretch goals, mostly announced fairly early on, but modified as the campaign continued.  Artisan Dice, still fairly early in the campaign with 35 days to go as I write this, has six stretch goals with more hinted to be revealed further down the line.  Zombicide Season 2 has 45 stretch goals currently at just 5 days to go, with a few optional bits that aren't quite stretch goals, but have been revealed similarly.  Fate Core had 35 stretch goals.  And Werewolf 20th Anniversary had 12 stretch goals, though they were bigger ticket items such as whole new books.

While most of the campaigns I haven't backed have had stretch goals, those goals were often, in my mind, unobtainable.  They were set out past the funding goal (which is the norm), but when the goal is so far out that it may be unobtainable, stretch goals fail to add extra incentive.  Similarly, I find that I'm most motivated when there are a few stretch goals laid out at the start and more are added as the campaign goes on.  That pattern taps into my curiosity and encourages me to share the Kickstarter and raise my pledge more than a list of stretch goals which is completely set down before the campaign even begins.  Obviously, I'm sure the best campaigns have their goals planned internally before the Kickstarter begins, but there's no need for full disclosure right away.

In looking back, a lot of the campaigns I've backed have shared quite a few attributes and given their success, it seems like those attributes are attractive to quite a few people.  The key outlier in my purchasing habits here seems to be the Werewolf 20th Anniversary book.  It had a higher funding goal, fewer stretch goals revealed less frequently, and didn't provide the actual produced item until a much higher pledge level.  I think that the key factor that got me to overlook those things that might normally turn me off was the fact that I was highly familiar with White Wolf/Onyx Path and the product that I'd be purchasing.  The same goes for Zombicide in some ways, as I knew that $50 was less than I'd pay for the full game once released and I already owned Season 1.

As a side note, I've left out one Kickstarter which I backed with the intent of helping a 9 year old girl go to camp to learn to make computer games.  I excluded it because I consider it a charitable donation more than a purchase and am not concerned with getting a final product back.  Normally, I'd do that sort of thing on Indiegogo, but it happened where it happened.

A Ramble on Writing

I enjoy writing, it serves as a stress relief for me and I like giving others something to read for their entertainment.  For a long time, it was hard for me to stay focused on a story to finish anything of any significant length, though, without it being a collaborative story.  Last year, I changed my strategy up a bit and finally found some success.

The inspiration for the change came from a few different sources.  First, I recalled my experience in college setting time-goals for my writing (I was on 10-week quarters and had to have, if I recall, 6 stories submitted in the class); that meant I needed to get my stories done in compact forms.  While most were 1 or 2 page vignettes, I did write out a few longer stories which were successful mostly because I couldn't leave them open-ended to write as much as I want.  Second, I got a few minutes to speak with Nate Kenyon (author of Starcraft Ghost: Spectres and Diablo III: The Order among other things) at Blizzcon; we didn't talk about my writing at all, but hearing him talk about his process and how he got support for his books and was excited about getting a chance to jump into Blizzard's worlds was inspiring.  Third, I heard (again at Blizzcon) about one of the past winners of the Blizzard Writing Contest being employed to write stories leading up to the release of Mists of Pandaria; I'll admit, I was jealous, and decided I was going to do that.

So putting all those things together, I sat down with the intention of writing an entry for the Blizzard Writing Contest.  That goal gave me an easy route to the structure I needed to finish; the contest generally took submissions between September and October, entries needed to be between 2500 and 7500 words, and entries needed to be original fiction set in a Blizzard world.  I chose Starcraft, because it was the world I was playing most in at the time and it has always been my favorite of all the Blizzard games I've played.  I reread the Starcraft books I own (and picked up those just releasing, such as Devil's Due), replayed StarCraft and Starcraft II (and another Blizzard game from WAY back in the day, but that's my secret at the moment).  And I set out to get writing.  I began by coming up with a general arc for the story, focusing on having a concrete beginning and end (which was a first, generally, I know major plot points and the beginning, but never the end) and set to work building a spinal outline between them.

I got lucky in that I found a few people who were willing to question my writing and provide feedback to what I was doing.  They got to see the story grow from just under long enough for a minimum entry to about 6000 words.  That was where I felt the story settling down, feeling like it was contained enough to be called complete.  There's no doubt I could add more and, amusingly, I feel like I left the ending semi-open, but at the same time, I think there's a sort of resolution, finality in the openness.

Unfortunately, the Blizzard Writing Contest didn't happen last year.  For a short while, that was almost enough to make me lose sight of the accomplishment I'd made.  My wife had asked me to write a second story, still set in the same world but with, in her words, "more romance."  I floundered on starting that.  But once the year changed, I could look back and be proud of meeting the goal even if I didn't get to show it to who I'd written it for.

With the return of Blizzcon this year, I've got renewed hope that the contest will return.  I got to ask the Warcraft twitter account if they thought it'd be back and got a "I hope so!" which I feel is positive.  So I'm back to the task of the second story.  It's sitting at just a hair under 3000 at the moment, in about 4 weeks of writing, which means I'm moving far faster than the first story.  I can see where my process is being refined so that I can do this more efficiently.  I'm beginning to feel that, even if I don't win the contest, this is excellent practice for me; if I can do it and keep working on it, eventually I'll get to my goals of being published.  I just have to keep writing.

It's Fated

I feel like a good place to start off writing here is to talk about my experience with the Fate Core Kickstarter.  Simply put, it was awesome!

Okay, so I could end there, but you should know WHY it was awesome!  I've been a fan of Fate for a while.  I first played Fudge maybe four or five years ago with friends in an attempt to introduce them to the Rifts world.  It was fun for one game, but didn't really hold anyone's attention.  I liked the simple mechanics, though.  Skip ahead a couple years and the Dresden Files RPG was released by Evil Hat (publishers of Fate Core).  My buddy decided he was going to run it, and here were those funky dice from my long before Fudge game.

DFRPG runs on the preceding version of Fate to Fate Core.  Our game was tons of fun, even if the sudden disappearance of half our party (and the representatives of our in-game Russian mafia) disappeared. I liked the mechanics even better, even if there were some rough spots.  Fate was quickly my Sunday group's favorite system.  Between DFRPG and the upcoming release of Fate Core we've used the also excellent Strands of Fate/Strands of Power system.

But anyways, back to the Kickstarter!  I managed to hear about it within 24 hours of it going live, and being familiar with Evil Hat, jumped right in.  When I signed up, I was in for one book and there were maybe 5 or 6 stretch goals announced.

The game was funded, if I recall, about ten hours after I pledged.  Quickly, the stretch goals representing various settings based on Fate Core mechanics began to be left in the dust.  Even better, the Fate Core book was ready for download right away!  I could get into the system without waiting for publishing and shipping!

And them came some awesome stretch goals like The Deck of Fate (playing cards with Fate dice results doubling as fate points!) and Fate Accelerated (a stripped down version of the game designed for newbies!).  In that time period , the settings books began to be available, too.  I can tell you right now that I've read Kreigszepplin Valkyrie and Camelot Trigger cover to cover and I'm in love with those settings.  But even better was when all the settings became print books, which I was promptly able to buy in for.  Ditto a Fate Core toolkit book and Fate Accelerated got their own books.

In the end, I pledged $80 and paid an extra $20 for separate shipping and am pulling in 4 physical books, those same four books in PDF/ePub/mobi, a font, pdfs of at least 2 other upcoming Evil Hat books, sounds files and videos of Fred Hicks of Evil hats doing funny things, and pdfs and utilities pledged by other backers of Fate Core, which looks to be adding another half-dozen pdfs to my haul. Not te mention that further Fate projects have been funded because of this single Kickstarter.  All that while watching a rocketing ascent to over $433,000 of a stated $3,000 goal!  The folks over at Evil Hat seemed so genuinely excited and proud of their Kickstarter that it's hard not to be thrilled.  (And why would I not be?)  Truly, Fate Core's Kickstarter set an amazing standard for RPG Kickstarters to aspire to!