Comparisons

We’ve just finished our first Gamefound campaign, after four increasingly successful Kickstarters. I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive on the differences (bear in mind my Kickstarter experience is now over a year old - things might have changed in the meantime).

Why did we change? Kickstarter was working well for us, we had raised over £75,000 through four campaigns. Why would we risk changing? Blockchain is the answer to that. If you live in Europe you’ll have probably experienced a record breaking heatwave in the last week. It was over 2 degrees C hotter than the previous record in the UK and over 4 degrees hotter than the previous record in my city. The world is on fire and it’s our fault. We need to make radical changes to prevent tipping points in the climate.

Blockchain is hugely energy intensive. BitCoin is the worse example, but even the Proof of Stake chains require a lot of energy. Kickstarter announced a move to blockchain last year without providing any real reason at all. When pushed by numerous incensed creators and backers they doubled down ‘Blockchain!’.

Contrast that with Gamefound whose equivalent message was all how how they would be helping creators and backers. Rather that pouring fuel on the planetary fire. We’d used them three times already for pledge managers, so it was a natural choice. But was it a good one?

TL;DR: It was our best campaign ever, but I’m pretty sure we’re would have raised even more on Kickstarter with the same campaign. But I don’t regret it at all.

Gamefound has a lot of advantages. You can have a preview page that’s a landing page with real content that you can make available before the project is reviewed. A dedicated account manager with good response times on queries. Add-ons and stretch goals are first class citizens. They handle EU VAT for you. And the pledge manager is in the same place. We were also offered a free banner ad on the site.

But there are also plenty of downsides (though this is very early days and I expect lots of these will get addressed quite quickly). The worse was the lack of notifications on comments - I find myself having to frequently check the page comments and all the updates to see if I’ve missed responding to any comments. The ads between updates and comments confused a lot of people, so we got responses to update questions on the main page comments. Our backers complained the site was hard to use and the ads were too intrusive. Some backers had pledges blocked by their card issuers (if you’re in the US a Polish company looks more dodgy that an US one). There’s no app and a much smaller user base so we got a lot less pledges on the last day than last time. In fact we probably lost a bunch of backers because they’ve never heard of Gamefound (but know Kickstarter). Kickstarter claim to provide 40-45% of the backers on our previous campaigns. I’d always assumed that was some creative accounting and most of it came from the ads we ran, but maybe not so much. We got almost nothing directly attributed to Gamefound.

There was also a few features of the Kickstarter dashboard I missed (the stream of pledge/adjustments/cancellations including backer name, the graph showing various pledge backer totals in a single place).

Campaign performance by day, darker lines are more recent

We had 40% more people on our mailing list, nearly four times as many followers at launch, three times the marketing budget and a bigger draw project - it added multiplayer rules which people have been clamouring for. And we raised 8% more than last time. It’s not quite a fair comparison as Gamefound doesn’t include shipping in the pledges, but even assuming similar shipping to last time that’s still only 24%. I’m pretty sure we’d have done better than that on Kickstarter.

But I don’t regret it. We need rapid systemic change to minimise the effects of climate change. Blockchain is an ecological disaster and companies should be avoiding it like the plague, not starting to embrace it. Our decision costs us money, but it’s one I’ll happily repeat - we’re going to have to collectively make far bigger sacrifices in the coming years.