How Space Haven's community helped raise $260,189 on Kickstarter!
Can you still get big funding from Kickstarter in 2020?
Assuming you’ve read the title of this post, the answer is clearly YES! But having an amazing idea and a great presentation isn’t all. The most important thing before you start your campaign is to have a community. I’ve seen so many Kickstarters fail by just launching and hoping it will sell itself. It won’t.
Building a community is a long term process. I would recommend anyone starting as an indie game dev to get a Twitter account, and show what you’re doing, but that’s a completely different blog post.
I started studying Kickstarters during fall 2019, and since the Kickstarter for Space Haven was in february 2019, it completely fell off my radar. However, the amount of funding and support they got was extraordinary. Most indie games on Kickstarter have a goal between $20.000 and $50.000, and Space Haven had $40.000, maybe hoping to surpass it, and boy they did.
What was their secret? Spoiler warning: Hard work! But keep on reading to find out more!
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Space Haven by Bugbyte
I got the chance to speak to Aksel Junkkila from Bugbyte, who had a crowdfunding campaign for their game Space Haven in the start of 2019.
Aliens try to capture your crew members alive. See them suffer or save them. It’s one of many interesting choices in Space Haven.
First, can you tell us about the game?
Space Haven combines the emergent story telling components of RimWorld with a tile-based gas-simulation system seen in Oxygen Not Included. The game tasks the player to build spaceships tile by tile, create optimal gas conditions, manage the needs and moods of their crew, encounter other space-faring groups, and explore the universe in search of a new Earth.
We've worked on Space Haven for close to 4 years now, it all started with a dream to build a colony sim type of game, with base building at the core. It was something we had never done before and were inspired by RimWorld and the Battlestar Galactica tv series.
Could you tell us a little bit about the team and how they were involved in the campaign?
We're 3-man strong, and the core tasks are mostly divided as programmer, graphic artist and community/marketing. We've been developing games together for 7-8 years now, and have grown to know each other well under that time.
How long in advance did you start preparing for the Kickstarter, and what did you do?
In a way Kickstarter preparation starts when you decide to make a game and possibly have a Kickstarter in the future. The process is life long. What I mean by this is that community building is key, and it is built over the years, with marketing but also by releasing games and staying close to the community, listening to them.
To be more specific about the campaign itself: We usually reserve a couple of months to really polish the Kickstarter page and trailer before launching a Kickstarter.
Build and manage your spaceship in an isometric tile based system
On launch day, you immediately got 573 backers and it kept going for several days. What was the secret?
The main thing to our success was to build our community over many years, 6 - 7 years to be exact. Of course, this has to be combined with an interesting game idea, something players want to play. We reached thousands of players, and notified them well before the Kickstarter that we're planning to do one.
Having a development blog and regularly updating our community on how the game has been progressing has been key to keep our players interested. In addition to that we had contacted Youtubers and Twitch streamers beforehand to play the Alpha demo and spread the word once the campaign launches.
During the middle and end of the campaign, did you have any particular strategy?
It is indeed hard to keep a good pace during the middle phase of the Kickstarter campaign, but we tried to engage our community to help spread the word. We also tried posting on imgur and Reddit, and the March 5 spike can be attributed to a reddit post, which caught momentum among readers.
Did you make any special promotion in the last few days? The last week and days was as incredible as the start.
Towards the end of the Kickstarter campaign, the ones that have been interested but have yet to pledge start to come alive. Many want to follow the campaign first and decide later if they should join or not. Kickstarter will also give a little more visibility towards the end, because they want campaigns to succeed as well. We didn't do anything special, just tried to spread the word as much as possible by contacting Youtubers to play the Alpha demo and asking our community to help out.
Did you use any paid marketing or any outside help?
Regarding paid advertising we did invest a little bit into Facebook ads, and had success with it. However, overall it was a small portion of the total funds raised though, there was not enough scaling in our case to make significant amount of funds come from paid Facebook ads. It did help keep the pace a little bit stronger in the middle though, which was great.
What do you think is the most important part of your campaign that made it successful?
The most important part which contributed to our success was years of work focusing on community driven game development, combined with an interesting game idea. Having an Alpha demo for streamers to play helped too.
If you could turn back time and redo the campaign, would you do something different?
It has been almost a year since we launched the Kickstarter campaign. Thinking about the campaign now I cannot really find anything that we missed or did wrong, the campaign was a fantastic success for us. We executed it very well in my mind, and a lot of that can be attributed to experience and past Kickstarters, both failed and a successful one.
What advice would you give to other small indie game studios that want to do a Kickstarter?
My advice to other small indie studios would be to focus on building a community first. Can't get someone to put their email on your newsletter list? Then you should not expect them to be putting their money into your campaign. Figure out the part with acquiring emails first, and start thinking of a Kickstarter campaign once you have enough of them to make you believe you can achieve your goal.
Building a community from scratch is hard work, you need to get your game out there and hope it is attractive to players seeing material of it. It requires patience and testing, trying different forums and posting in a way where you are not a spammer, but also a contributor.
A Kickstarter campaign in itself is a community building tool, and can be used as such. However, I would not recommend launching a Kickstarter with a nonexistent community, but if the first campaign fails it may not mean the game is entirely hopeless, not if a decent amount of backers were acquired even though the goal failed. It is possible to try again and keep the backers, which backed the first campaign, in the loop and ready to support the next one.
7 things to learn from Bugbyte for aspiring Indie Game Kickstarters
Build a community first
Get people to join your newsletter, if they can do that, they may want to back you too
Have a demo of your game ready for people to play
Find Youtubers to play your demo before the Kickstarter launch
Notify the community before the Kickstarter launch to build hype
Facebook ads can be an option to keep the momentum going in the middle of the campaign
If your campaign fails, keep building the community, then try again when you’re stronger
We thank Aksel a lot for his time. If you want to know more about Space Haven, make sure to:
Check out Bugbyte's website
Wishlist and follow Space Haven on Steam
Wishlist and follow Space Haven on GoG
Follow Space Haven on Twitter
Check out Space Haven on Kickstarter (Learn from this amazing trailer!)
On a totally different note, listen to their amazing soundtrack by Paul Zimmermann
We will be back soon with more interesting interviews. Follow @bluegoogames on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter to get updates.
