Kickstarter interrogations

After having observed for some time the Kickstarter ecosystem and crunch its numbers extensively, I have found myself involved in a Kickstarter campaign with one of my client.

The game in question, Strike Suit Zero, has been in development for a while, and I have been involved with it since the very beginning (and the game is NOT an online game, a very unusual occurrence for me). Its campaign is in its second week, and doing very well with 90% of its objective reached. I am obviously very excited by the current situation, but my point here is not to talk about this project specifically. This will likely come later, probably as a post mortem on what I assumed it was like to run a Kickstarter and it was really like to run one.

Today, UK Kickstarter projects can be launched, and this is a major milestone.

The process to open a US Kickstarter is certainly not easy, even less when the main team is based overseas. So this expansion to the UK is going to be a tremendous opportunity for a vast number of creative people. But it comes with a lot of uncertainties too and the following days are going to be very interesting. So let me lay out for you some of the questions I have at the moment (especially for the early days, I have to say):

• I anticipate a Tsunami of projects to land just about now. Momentum is absolutely paramount for a campaign to work out. With all those projects, are there going to be a lot of attention that very few will benefit from? Is it going to be so diluted that only very small scale projects will actually succeed? Are they going to behave the way the current US campaigns do?

• With that influx of projects, are the US projects going to struggle? Is it going to have no influence? Are they going to benefit from the influx of traffic overall?

• How will the Kickstarter communities react to seeing prices in GBP/£? The audience is still massively from the US (and that seems to be changing over time but still), how comfortable will they be pledging in a currency not their own? I feel Europeans are a lot more exposed to USD as a currency on a regular basis and more likely to accept this. But I might be wrong.

Overall, Kickstarter for me is still very much  an evolving creature and I have a lot of other unanswered questions of that nature. Like, how will the ecosystem evolve after a few fairly large “failures” (either a large campaign that just never delivers its rewards or one that delivers way below the expectations)? What is the Kickstarter/Sales ratio? How much more revenue do you make off a successful campaign – are you merely making the same amount of money or is Kickstarter really just the tip of the iceberg (I suspect a few projects have been gambling a lot on what that ratio will be)? Project Giana has now launched and might now know? I should probably go and ask the FTL guys too…

In any case, I am very curious (and quite excited too) to see what the UK launch is going to bring us even if I ultimately believe this will be a good thing and expand the crowdfunding volumes overall.