The secret to 1000+ backers for your Indie Game on Kickstarter
How many backers are enough on Kickstarter?
Of course, this depends on the goal of your campaign and the price of your tiers. A very common and popular tier for indie games on kickstarters are $15-20. An average goal for successful campaigns is somewhere between $30,000-40,000. That means that you’d need about 2,000 backers to meet your goal. Getting 2,000 people to back your campaign isn’t impossible, but it’s not easy.
So is it possible to reach your goal with fewer backers? Or greatly surpass your goal? One recipe for that is by having really interesting higher tiers with unique rewards, it’s possible to get even more on average per backer. Make sure that you’ll be able to fulfill these rewards, that you will give to your most dedicated fans.
How to get people to choose a higher tier?
In the case of todays interview, about Unbound: Worlds Apart, they got more than $40,000 from more than 1,000 backers, which means the average is around $40. The reason the average is so high, is that they got several high tier pledges, including two amazing pledges of $5,000 from their top tier, which includes an amazing list of rewards. Some of the coolest ones are:
Your name engraved in a magic stone
Design a monument that will appear in the game
Design a monster <— I love this! (Editors note. :)
Webinar on Programming or Art
Create your own NPC
A limited edition 3D statue
Work with us to create a new puzzle and a new Portal
Your name in the credits as "Co-Producer"
Some of these are physical rewards and I’ve heard from some people that it can be a lot of work fulfilling them, so a wise move can be to have them in the absolute top tiers.
But the rewards wasn’t everything to their success. Keep reading to find the rest of the ingredients to their succesful Kickstarter recipe!
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Unbound: Worlds Apart by Alien Pixel Studios
Today I had the opportunity to speak with Craitoiu Sergiu from Alien Pixel Studios, about their crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for the game Unbound: Worlds Apart in may 2019. If you’ve seen anything from Unbound: Worlds Apart, you’ll probably agree with me that it’s truly stunning, and has a very unique and interesting twist for puzzle solving.
What’s Unbound about?
Unbound: Worlds Apart is a 2D atmospheric puzzle-platformer, where the main character, Soli, can use different magic portals to travel between realities. Inside the portals, the laws of physics and abilities of the character can change, opening up new and interesting ways to progress through the game.
As Soli discovers more about the world and the portals, players will explore a dark fairy tale and stunning hand-crafted environments that beg to be unraveled.
We started working on this game in 2017 and I'm really passionate about it because it's really, really hard and challenging to design a game having two different worlds at the same time. The amount of work on the artistic part doubles as well. And we have to make sure that everything is perfectly aligned to not ruin the player experience.
Using magic powers, Soli can conjure portals to other worlds to solve interesting puzzles
Who’s on the team and how were they involved in the campaign?
At the moment of the Kickstarter campaign, we were only 2 devs in the team. During the game development, Olga was handling all the art and I was the game designer and programmer.
But during the pre-campaign and the campaign itself, we created a big plan where we both have to create content, handle some PR and marketing and of course building the right community in order to keep the people interested and excited about the game.
How were you planning the Kickstarter, and what did you do?
We started thinking about creating a Kickstarter campaign back in May 2018. And our first thought was that we can do the campaign in October the same year. But in September, the demo for the game was not ready and we didn't gather a very big community.
I remember that we didn't even have a Discord server and only a small number of people followed us on Twitter. Based on what we read online about failed Kickstarters we figure out that we are not ready for this and decided to postpone it until May 2019. During this time we started to post more often, we created the Discord server, polished the demo a lot and create a nice looking and interesting trailer. Only the trailer for the campaign took us over a month to create.
On launch day, you had a great start. What did you do to reach out to as many people as possible?
A few months before the campaign we told our community on Discord that we are going to create a Kickstarter for the game and we need their advice and support from them. From time to time we discussed the Kickstarter campaign that we were going to do.
One month before the launch day, our strategy was to publicly release our trailer announcing the Kickstarter campaign and post it on social media, send a press release, etc. We contacted a PR company called GameIfYouAre to help us with the press release.
During the whole pre-campaign, we started to post more often on social media networks, making sure that we also have some info about Kickstarter in each post. Two weeks before the campaign we released our demo over Discord. This was a nice surprise for the community and we were so happy that they like the demo. They also help us to find some bugs in the game so we had some time to fix them.
On launch day, we just sent the PR release and announcement on social media. The first round of backers came from the family, Discord community and our friends who wanted to support us.
There are a lot of interesting characters you will meet in the world of Unbound: Worlds Apart.
During the middle and end of the campaign, did you have any particular strategy?
The middle of the Kickstarter campaign is very difficult and you always have to be creative and think about how to bring more people to your Kickstarter page. First of all, we wanted to keep the community engaged, talk with them and be very active over Social Media, respond to all the comments and post very often.
The Kickstarter Updates are really important because they show that you care about the product and the campaign and they will keep the community active. Also in these updates, you can do some cross-promotion with other Kickstarter campaigns. In our updates, we wrote about some other active Kickstarter campaigns and they wrote about us as well in their updates. We had some spikes of backers because a few backers found out about the Unbound campaign from cross-promotion and those particular updates made some people raise their pledges.
We put our demo on Steam, Itch.io, and Gamejolt. The game was featured on itch.io and Gamejolt and the demo had a button with "Support us on Kickstarter" page and that got us some pledges as well. Lots of YouTubers made a video because they found about the game through the KeyMailer website, however, the demo must be on Steam because you need to send Steam keys through the system. I think we sent over 1000 keys.
At the mid of the campaign, we announced the Switch port and we sent another round of press release to Switch only magazines. Reddit and Imgur are also very good because you can engage with new people and convert them to backers. We did some podcasts, interviews and we also had a booth at Comic-Con in our country, Romania.
Did you make any special promotion in the end of the campaign?
In the last few days, besides posting on Social Media, we did a few live streams on Twitch and people got really excited to connect more with us and they increased their pledges and told their friends about us to back the game. We wanted to hit another stretch goal so we encouraged people to support us in updates.
Did you use any paid marketing or any outside help?
We didn't use any paid marketing advertising. We only had the PR company I mentioned, to help us with the press releases, proofread our campaign since we are not native English speakers and help us with marketing strategy and advise us during the campaign. It was very effective, some big gaming websites wrote about our Kickstarter campaign. They definitely helped us to increase the hype and validate the campaign for some unsure backers.
What do you think is the most important part of your campaign that made it successful?
I think there are 4 important things that have to be perfect for a successful Kickstarter campaign:
Build a community beforehand.
Have a polished 10-20 minute demo to your audience, to show what they are backing. This is super important especially if nobody knows about your studio or past games.
A good game trailer to hook you immediately.
A very good structure for the campaign.
Is there anything you would have done different if you could redo the campaign?
When we started our campaign back in May there were so many good games running their campaigns at the same time as us. There were at least 3 other good looking platformers. However, in March-April there wasn’t much going on in Kickstarter’s gaming section. I always wondered what would have happened if we’ve had the campaign those months…
What advice would you give to other small indie game studios that want to do a Kickstarter?
My advice is to check other game creators that have had a Kickstarter campaign for their game in your genre and try to figure out what they did in order to succeed or why did they failed.
Analyze what others have done in their campaigns:
Their page structure
Rewards section
Trailer
Demo
Which Youtubers or Streamers covered them?
How did they get backers through Social Media?
Also choosing a good period for the Kickstarter is crucial, make sure you don't overlap with AAA games launching weeks, international holidays like Christmas or New Year, big gaming events like GDC, E3 or Gamescom or a Steam Sale.
Do you have any last tips or tricks that you want to share?
Yes, after the campaign is over, make sure to set up a way for latecomers to be able to back the campaign, like using PayPal or IndieGogo.
Thanks a lot to Craitoiu for taking the time to do this interview. If you want to know more about Unbound: Worlds Apart, make sure to:
Wishlist and follow Unbound on Steam
Follow Unbound on Twitter
Follow Unbound on Facebook
We will be back soon with more interesting interviews. Follow @bluegoogames on Twitter and subscribe to our newsletter to get updates.
