Kickstarter or other funding

[Timobkg]

The recent Kickstarter craze (3.4 mil for DoubleFine, currently 120k for FTL, 100k for Banner Saga, 1.4 mil for Wasteland 2) reminded me of Grim Dawn, to check up on how you guys were doing.

People seem to be on a spending spree on Kickstarter right now, so you should definitely do it, and do it now!

The only thing you have to lose is the time spent setting up a Kickstarter, and the time spent dealing with the huge influx of people to your forums.

[EdibleYeti]

Originally Posted by doublebuck

I would say that Iron Lore and Titan Quest are well recognized in the industry, let alone in the arpg community. Crate has a solid background and even if GD is not yet as hyped as D3 or TL2, it's getting more and more attention every day.

Iron Lore and Titan Quest were fairly popular to a certain extent, but they don't have the pedigree or name recognition of Tim Schafer (that's not a knock on Crate, just a simple fact). Titan Quest, despite being a great game didn't exactly catch the world on fire. Otherwise we'd be playing Titan Quest 2 right now. Does Crate need Tim Schafer levels of kickstarter funds to make it worthwhile? Maybe not, but medierra summed it up fairly well.

At the end of the day, they really have nothing to lose though. Either they make a significant amount of money or they don't. But if they don't receive the amount of money they would need to actually make any difference on the project then they basically have a lot of funds from people that really didn't make a difference anyway. Medierra pointed out they'd need a pretty big sum of money to make any signifcant difference. And of course if you set your kickstarter funding goal too high, you won't get anything.

But again, they could just attempt a kickstarter. Either it works or it doesn't. Set the goal high enough so that it would help out, even if it may be a somewhat unrealistic goal. Then if word spreads and there really are enough fans perhaps they might actually reach it. And if they dont, nothing lost anyway.

But due to the factors involved I completely understand Crate not bothering with Kickstarter.

[Thorns]

Any update on what are your plans for Kickstarter medierra?

[medierra]

I'm actually working on a Kickstarter project right now. It is a fair amount of work to get set up and the biggest thing will be trying to produce a decent video. We're hoping to get it up in the next week or so.

When I initially looked at Kickstarter, my thought was that it seemed unlikely for us to be able to generate much more than a $100k or so based on what other projects were doing. However, given the level of money Double Fine and Wasteland have generated, I think it is definitely worth trying out.

What would we need to do something useful? Well, we could do amazing things with a million or more but even $300k would be enough for us to bring on 2-3 more people full-time, which would be a HUGE help.

We're basically at this point right now where we have the technology mostly finished, the core gameplay is fully functioning and actually quite fun but it is just taking a looooonnnggg time to build out content. Just as an example, we currently have a backlog of 5 monsters that are finished but waiting on animation. Our animator is working as hard as he can but he lost a few weeks crunching on that Warhammer 40k MMO. So, really, just being able to get a few more people working full-time would speed things up tremendously.

I'll share the project link with you guys before I make it live so you can provide feedback.

[Rainier Wolfcastle]

Hmm guess its time to dig deep gents. Lets make Bruno shit a brick when he see's the day one total.

[Thorns]

Ok that's awesome news then!
I 'll write down some stuff I observed on kickstarter, I am guessing you already know this but hopefully there will be something to help you.

1) Make a good video. A few words about the game, who you are, why funding is important and loads of content from the game. The occultist video is an excellent start. You can add some bestiary section since the mobs look fantastic to me personally, no need to be ingame, just the mob in animation would do.

2) Good layout explaining game story and key elements like multiplayer, random loots etc. Some concept images during the text add to the impact it makes.

3) Give goals, for example at $500 000 you will add another class, $750 000 another game area and so on. This keeps backers excited on reaching those marks, which helps to generate interest and hype.

4) Well thought rewards. I saw t-shirts are popular amongst backers, posters etc. One idea I saw on WL2 website was community websites were gathering money to get the higher rewards like naming npc's and locations. They want to name a bar after their websites name 'no mutants allowed' which I found it a cool idea to offer at the higher hierarchy of pledges. Plus I liked the pledge on naming an item in the game world and the backer describes the story behind it. Or a backer adds an ability in the game for the mobs.

5) Release more videos containing in-game footage throughout the kickstarter duration so people can check it more often so it makes it to the popular section a few times.

6) Let the game websites know that you are in Kickstarter, so they will do a news section on it, hopefully with again game footage. Also big industry figures so they can make it more popular through twitter,fb. I am sure Fargo would happily pass on word for Grim Dawn.

Lastly check out Hardcore Tactical Shooter by Christian Allen on Kickstarter that looks like it won't make the target. In the comments the people explain in their opinion why it failed, maybe you can identify some stuff to avoid for Grim Dawn kickstarter.

Sorry for the long post, even if one part in this wall of text was helpful I'm happy

[medierra]

Thank you for the suggestions. I hadn't thought of this but it was especially useful to go look at the comments for Tactical Shooter.

Fortunately, I think most of the things people brought up won't be a problem for us because we've already been doing this for so long, we have a very well defined game and plenty for people to see. In fact, out of Double Fine, Wasteland and Tactical Shooter, I think we're the only ones who are already well into development. I don't know how much of a difference it will make but I would think people would feel better about contributing knowing we've made a lot of sacrifice ourselves to get the game as far as its come already.

[Scryer]

I just wanted to post this here -

http://kickingitforward.org/

I'm not sure what you guys think of this or if it's a possibility, it sounds pretty cool is all. ^_^

[medierra]

Hah, looks like he beat me to it. I was actually already planning to say that we'd donate a % of our profits to future kickstarter game projects that looked promising. I just probably wouldn't have made the icon purple...

[SHODANFreeman]

Given the attention the Wasteland 2 one is getting, kicking it forward couldn't hurt the publicity.