I am currently looking at my kickstarter project (Kickstart Project) and i am disappointed. I really hoped that i would have generated a lot more interest by now. I wonder why it is not doing very well. Itis certainly not doing as well as i had hoped. I felt my rewards are very worth it, especially after researching other games that did get funded. Maybe it is because i ma on Xbox and Not PC (though i am on PC of course for the reward versions). I wonder what else i could do to advertise the project. I have posted about it on Twitter on several Indie facebook pages. I have released a press release that i saw all over the place. Howwever i still do not have much interest.
I do have a few people who have contacted me complaining about not being able to find it. If you choose discover on Kickstarter and then go to Gaming. You get a filtered version of the projects that is filtered by Recommended. This is odd as i have no idea how one gets on the recommended listing. So if you are not on that list, you have to change your search settings to new releases and mine is on the second page of that list. I have emailed Kickstarter a few times, but i still do not have a clue what is going on. Why the default list is the recommended one and not new releases is interesting, though of course their decision. My final thought on the odd recommended list is that there are several funded and finished projects in the list. Odd that when some were finished weeks ago.
So it isn't doing well, it does not look like i will get to spend that money on improving my game and getting it on multi formats. Maybe i will have more success with the next one. I can only hope.
Still on the bright side... If it does not get funded the game will be out much sooner on Xblig (or at least in Peer reveiw).
G'night
Saturday, July 31, 2010
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I've done a fair amount of research of my own on that very topic. If you search about Kickstarter, it's a very common woe. In fact it is the only one I've really seen. It seems a very strange thing to see so many complaints and not see any of them addressed by Kickstarter anywhere. It tickles my cynicism nerve quite heavily. I mean why make discover default to not showing all the projects? I also cannot decide why they don't have some kind of answer about that recommended status in the FAQ somewhere.
ReplyDeleteIt's quite obvious even to the casual observer that the products on the recommended list have a *much* higher success rate. Even the really stupid projects that make it on that list often get fully funded. The better ones get several times their asked for funding. What it comes down to is that the Kickstarter staff essentially gets to choose which projects will successfully be funded.
What's the staff's response to this? Well we barely see them talk around the Internet, but when they do, it usually essentially goes that projects are responsible for advertising themselves. I cannot decide if that is naivety, not realizing that the issue isn't advertising, but that because of the default restricted view prevents people from finding projects. Or if it's a bit more crafty than that. I cannot imagine what they gain if it is craftiness, but on the other hand they seem to be pretty intelligent people running Kickstarter and having a view filtered by default in a not obvious way is a pretty beginner mistake. Plus you have to think they've seen at least some of the messages about this. Especially since some have been addressed directly to them on their own site.
This had been bugging me to no end the last several days.
Best guess on what you can do to turn things about is to email them a copy of your game as it currently stands. Mark it up as a beta version, not for release, all that jazz. But hopefully they would try it out, get addicted, and just maybe add you to that recommended list. Your goal is reasonable enough that I think even at this point you'd have a good shot at being fully funded if you were to get on the recommended list now.
Anyways, best of luck and I hope you succeed!
Thanks EmptyDesert for that information and observation. I have only 2 weeks left now, so i might start tidying up A Shooter. You know removing all the work in progress i have been working on in anticipation of enhancing the game. ahh well.
ReplyDeleteDa VoodooChief