Kickstarter Stats - A Deep Dive

In November 2018 we launched the Kickstarter campaign for FlickFleet, a 2-player space combat dexterity game (think the love-child of X-Wing Miniatures and Flick 'Em Up).

We'd just formed a limited company taking the place of a previous sole trading company that I'd been running for a year to self-publish Zombology. We weren't really ready for Kickstarter, but we went for it and were successful (just) in funding. Last week we finished shipping the last reward tier four months early, so now we're in a position to take a look back at how it went. I'm hoping these stats will be useful for people hoping to bring a game to Kickstarter in the near future.

One big proviso first: ours was a slightly odd campaign (we hand-crafted the rewards and our stretch goals were for moving to professional manufacturing) and there's no guarantee your experience will be similar!

Our campaign ran from 8th November 2018 to 8th December 2018, funding with 4 hours to spare. We wanted to raise £12,000 to fund all the materials to make the rewards and buy a laser cutter to enable us to make the ships ourselves. 325 backers raised £12,127 of our goal (101% funded). Eighteen of those had payment failures, but by the end of the week-long grace period twelve had managed to pay successfully, so we can 319 backers and £11,891 (99% funded). One of the dropped backers later paid by PayPal, so it was slightly better than that.

Kickstarter say their fees are 8-10%, so we'd banked on getting £10,800 (90% of our target), but in our case the fees were £1,008 (8.4%), so we ended up with more than we'd bargained for, despite the dropped pledges (£10,883).

The biggest surprise of the campaign was the popularity of the deluxe version (the ships have their names and detailing etched onto their top surface) . We'd made 50 available expecting a few of our close friends to get some, with maybe 20 or 30 going in total. Those 50 sold out within 16 hours. When it became clear we weren't going to be on the hook for hand-crafting ~700 games in a year, we made another 50 available and, when those went, another 50. Including the deluxe pledges and extra copies and people who later paid for an upgrade via PayPal we sold 138 deluxes and 136 standards. That still blows my mind. We also received 27 Zombology orders too.

The pledge breakdown was:

Reward	Backers	Pledge	Total	%
No Reward	35	£1	£169	1.4%
Print & Play	42	£5	£251	2.1%
Standard	98	£27	£3,422	28.8%
FF + Zombology	20	£37	£928	7.8%
Deluxe	116	£45	£6,511	54.8%
2 copies	8	£54	£610	5.1%

21 generous souls over-pledged to help us cross the line - thank you so much!

I was also amazed by the number of backers we got from the US, especially considering the cost of international shipping:

The top five destinations were the UK (42%), the US (35%), Germany (4%), Canada (3%) and Australia (3%).

According to Kickstarter 46% of our pledges came from them. I think that's debatable, but what I do know is that 41 people from our tiny mailing list backed the project. I was told at TableTop Gaming Live in September last year by a well-known industry guy who has run several successful Kickstarters that our mailing list of 136 people was nowhere near big enough for us to be successful. My counter argument was that most of the people on it had signed up because they were interested in FlickFleet and I was expecting maybe 40 of them to back the project. 41 did! 15% of our total was from people on our mailing list before the project went live. That meant from the 136 people (including backers and non-backers) we had a 30% backer-rate and a £13.08 per subscriber average pledge. Clearly this will never be this high again - as our mailing list grows these figures will go down.

The second highest single source was twitter, where I'm very active. According to Kickstarter £1,495 of our total was directly attributable to twitter.

Finally our marketing spend was minuscule. We gave six prototypes to reviewers (and got five reviews). We spent £95 on marketing (£80 on flyers that we gave to a number of UK gaming/geek shops) and £15 on Facebook Ads. I've no idea whether the flyers worked, but the Facebook ad yielded at least one deluxe backer, and even it's only one, the ad made us money (after accounting for the Kickstarter fee, subsidised shipping, the cost of the game materials and the cost of the ad). Next time I think I would use them again and hopefully target them more effectively.

I hope this info has been useful (or at least interesting!), let me know in the comments if you have any questions.