In preparation for this week’s panel at Evolve, I refreshed the data collected on the successful Kickstarter Video Games projects. We decided at the last minute to focus more on projects stories rather than talking about data on the platform, but as the work was done, and it was 3 months since the last time I had a look, now is the perfect opportunity for a blog post on this.
The best is still for you to have a look at the document itself.
The panel this week was very one-sided in the end. Kickstarter has interesting challenges ahead of itself, but it is there to stay as a path for funding. That’s a very good thing in my opinion. The ecosystem will evolve, get more mature and we will get a few good and bad surprises still. A point I think I missed making during the panel though, is the very strong reliance on media, whether you talk about traditional media, or social media.
Social media is not much of a concern – they lend themselves very well to promote crowdfunded projects and Kickstarter makes a good use of them (Friend’s Discovery, I curse thou and my wallet too!), a number of projects were successful thanks to the support of traditional media and there tend to be some fatigue on their part. As the novelty of Kickstarter is wearing off, they tend to be either more critical (a good thing!) or not interested (a sad consideration).
Last thing, I will share my number two tips for going to Kickstarter, as asked at the end of the panel (arguably, we were asked the number 1 tip, but hey):
1# Become a backer yourself. Go on there, find projects you like and give them money. Go and live through a project’s campaign till its end (happy or sad) as a backer. That an important position to understand.
2# Do your homework. Don’t go on kickstarter without checking which projects work, how much they ask for, what they offer to backers, etc. especially, look for projects similar to yours.
