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.

Kickstarter Data Deep Dive

Paul and I chose to go to Kickstarter for FlickFleet because we needed funds up front for the laser cutter purchase and the raw materials for making the games.

We have an unusual two-phase campaign, and this was our first Kickstarter which will skew things I’m sure, but I wanted to look into the data we collected (some permanent, some transitory) and see what we can draw from it, and by sharing it here I hope there is something useful for you too.

We went into the project knowing that our audience wasn’t big enough to succeed. We needed help. We had figured on an average pledge of £31 (standard copy plus UK shipping) so we needed 387 backers. Our mailing list was 135 people and not all of them would want a copy, I guessed around 30% (40). So we needed to find another 347!

The fact that we were going to Kickstarter changed a few things about how we approached the launch - I made a few demo copies and send them to reviewers (6 in total but we only got five reviews due to a series of unfortunate events at one of the reviewers) and I also arranged a lot of podcasts and email interviews ahead of the Kickstarter launch. Usually review go out after I've hand-crafted all my pre-orders, so this attempting to build a buzz ahead of Kickstarter was all new to me. I think we did ok, the podcasts definitely helped, but we could have done with sending out more review copies I think, five reviews was only just enough.

One of the things we were really hoping for was that just the act of being on Kickstarter would help - we needed to find 347 people to support us somewhere. As it turns out we were right. 46% of the total raised during our campaign was raised through Kickstarter itself. Some of that is probably people who found out about it elsewhere and searched on Kickstarter, but a huge proportion of our total came from the platform itself. By comparison, 33% came from outside and only 19% directly from a link we shared.

Another large benefit of Kickstarter was finding out really early on that the deluxe versions were hugely popular. It allowed us to change the shape of the campaign on the fly - opening up more deluxe editions as time went on.

Downsides were plenty though. The campaign was plagued by a constant stream of cancellations, and Paul and I felt constantly at risk of further backwards progress - that made the whole experience very anxiety-inducing. In the end about 14% of backers cancelled their pledges (though a few of those eventually came back). This was compounded at the end when 18/325 backers had payment errors. By the end, this was down to 6/325 (2%) and the final total before fees was £11,891. Obviously this is lower than the amount of money we needed, but one of the joys of hand-crafting print runs is that we can change our print run size and there's no minimum, so we're still good.

A couple of things I clung to throughout the campaign were a couple of stats about successful campaigns. One, from Kickstarter itself, is that 98%  of all campaigns that reach 60% end up successfully funding. Another was that anecdotally, funding is split roughly 1/3 each between the first 48 hours, the middle and the last 48 hours. In our case the numbers were 31.8%, 48.5%, 19.7%, so even though we had a weak finish, we were well within 30% with 48 hours to go.

We had 723 project followers at the end, and we went from 12% to 17% of them backing the project after the email reminder went out. That's 37 backers at the end from the followers, or just over 5%.   

Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot!

Which was the jingle for an advert in the UK. No idea what it was an advert for though.

So the BoardGameGeek competition seems to be working. Yesterday several people commented how my games were near the top of the BGG Hot Games list, and Reiver Games was the hottest company. Today it's even better. Carpe Astra is the hottest game (with It's Alive! at number 3 and Sumeria at number 7), Yehuda, Dirk, R. H. Aidley and I are in the Hottest people list (though fairly near the bottom!) and Reiver Games is still the hottest games company (just ahead of Fantasy Flight!). As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've been keeping track of the BGG statistics in the run-up to this competition, so I could see what a difference the competition makes. Probably the two most interesting statistics are Owners (i.e. people who have bought the game and can be bothered to record the fact on BGG) and Num. Views (the number of people who have looked at a game). Here's the average increases before and during the competition (though I've only got two days data for during!):

	It's Alive!		Carpe Astra		Sumeria
	Owners	Num. Views	Owners	Num. Views	Owners	Num. Views
Before	0.69	42.67	0.23	38.00	0.00	28.83
During	0.50	1167.00	2.00	2395.50	0.00	558.50

The number of daily views for each game has increased by between 19 and 63 times (1900% and 6300%). I wouldn't expect a spike in owners buying each day yet, as I imagine people will wait to see if they've won the competition first. Fingers crossed I'll notice a boost in sales within a month though.

Border Reivers 1861st Best Game In The World

Border Reivers has finally got more than the thirty ratings needed to become ranked on BoardGameGeek. It is currently ranked 1861! The system of BGG rankings is intentionally biased against games with a small number of ratings to avoid small numbers of people (or indeed shillers) affecting the top ranked games. This is done using a Bayesian average - to get the ranking for a game the actual ratings are considered in addition to one hundred average ratings (the average rating for all games - currently around 5.3 I think). This means the thirty-one real ratings I have (average 6.9) are signficantly pulled down by the Bayesian spoof ratings. So please rate it!

This is one of the reasons why I've done a larger print run of It's Alive! as the larger print run should mean more people get a copy and hopefully I'll get more ratings. That way the ranking should be less affected by the Bayesian spoof ratings.

In other news I'm pressing on with the It's Alive! ordered copies and I've been revisiting Border Reivers. I had six copies of Border Reivers left at home: mine and five orders I've not sent yet because I'm waiting for the money. This week, two of those have gone - one to it's original orderer, and one to someone from my unofficial waiting list when one of the orders fell through. And another has started to move. I've only got four copies left at home. Weird. I've had the bits for it kicking around for nearly a year now, it's going to feel strange when it's all gone. I'll be very glad to have finished cutting out the tiles when that comes about though. As well as the remaining three copies (which are complete apart from their tiles) I also need to knock together another copy from the spares for another publisher who has expressed an interest.