The Premise
We chose Indiegogo as our crowdfunding platform mainly because it's the biggest one available for a Finnish startup. On the outset, Indiegogo figures for game funding look pretty bleak, only ten percent of all projects actually get funded. And only 1 percent of the funded ones are games. So Indiegogo is not the most obvious choice for funding if you look at the numbers only.
However, Indiegogo has brand recognizability and many european people tend to follow and sometimes even pledge. Our goal with the campaign was to reach as many people as possible and see what kind of reaction we could get. From that angle Indiegogo was a good choice.
Human network asset
Basic thing with crowdfunding is the idea of utilizing your existing contacts to help with the promotion of the campaign. Our total facebook contact amount was almost 800 people. Also we got to know a whole bunch of people thru all the gaming and investment events we've attended so far. There are many old contacts from the past, including a few prominent people on television and a bunch of internationally known rock stars we thought could at least put one tweet in for their fans. Looking from the social asset-point of view, we felt quite confident that we'd get some organic views thru our contacts.
Publicity stunts
It's vital to try and get visibility also outside the campaign. For that, we managed to get a co-operation deal with the Night of Arts here in Oulu, having our booth at the event and distributing a custom demo build of Hoodownr to interested people. This was really hard work, really burning the midnight oil for over a week with the team to get the build ready. We got print media attention and lots of backlinks to our site. The effort resulted in 2000 pairs of eyes on the project. The night of the arts was a success, after the event I keep bumping into people who have at least heard of Hoodownr. A few hundred people checked out our website out of those 2000 people.
The spammers
As I mentioned in the previous blog entry, once you start a crowdfunding campaign, you will be approached by professional spammers (they call themselves publicity specialists). They promise great success in exchange for a cut in the project proceedings. We conveniently ignored those guys because we wanted to try the spamming aspect ourselves. Spamming as in 'community outreach' or 'public relations'. The fact of the matter is that you won't get anywhere without spamming everybody. Out of 5 weeks we spend 2.5 weeks only spamming hard to get people to like our fb page and to take a look at the campaign.
Game Genre related
As our game is a totally new idea, there was no specific genre to target really. We found that power pushing to a generic category like sports games or android games is time wasted. This should have been obvious of course. The best response we've got from the urban exploration community, followed by the live-action roleplaying crowd. This took a bit of experimenting though, starting with a more generic target group was not such a bad idea as it forced us to rethink our approach all the time. I think the bigger and generic groups produce more views but no shares or pledges.
Who did pledge?
Going from the social asset point of here again, the most likely people to actually pledge are your friends and contacts. I read a study that says 60-70% of the pledges come from inside your own social network. That is, people who have already heard about your product and react when you give them a cue in the form of the campaign. This was indeed the case with us too. Just getting a reaction from one of your friends is challenging, you have to really push to get a like or something. If you are planning to run a campaign, do the FB like+twitter follow begging round well before actually launching the campaign. After you've done that, your target group only has two options for their reaction, the sharing or the pledging.
Amping it up
The fact of the matter is that no matter how good your campaign is, when you are not getting people to see it, it's not going to work. Getting visibility is vital. And that is going to cost you money. During the last days of the campaign we had a chance to talk to an ex-black hat spammer who gave us a quick tour on finding your audience. Boosting up your views and getting the campaign video featured in youtube is numero uno. In a country the size of Finland the gig costs maybe 200 euros (how it is actually done is via porn site clickbaits and other dubious methods). If you pay YT for the feature, most people will just ignore it as it is clearly just another advertisement. There are also a few other very effective black hat strategies you could use for a relatively low cost. Google is your friend.
Summa summarum
As this is getting quite long and there are a number of good guides to run your campaign on the net, I'll just wrap this up real quick. Rules of thumb for your campaign.
- Crowdfunding for indie games is not about funding, it's about promotion
- Spend 10k to make 10k. For your 10k you need to reach at least 100.000 people. simple.
- If you know a thousand people, 2-3% of them will consider pledging / sharing your link
- First round of spamming is the most effective. After that one start spending money.
- People in the position of helping you out by tweeting etc, won't do it.
- Use flexible funding. People who care about your project won't mind. honest.
- Find a way to get coverage outside the world of internet
- Not doing it is worse than giving it a try. Just do it!
These rules apply to all us real indie devs. If you have big bank, a proven track record or celebrity endorsement, you can totally defy the laws of gravity. If not, do it anyway!
What we got out of it (the good parts)
The campaign really made us focus on how to reach people. It's so much fun just making the game and testing it and it's easy to get lazy about the promotion aspect. Indiegogo made us make great leaps promotionwise. New concept art got created, we got thousands of views instead of tens of views and thru our organic approach (no black hat shit, no paid advertising) we reached numbers that are above our own projections of our market share. The days when Facebook likes kept coming on and on were really encouraging. We were really happy to get a message from Pepe Deluxe and made a few new friends along the way. All in all good times were had.
I'd recommend other indie game devs to try crowdfunding. Even if you won't meet your goal with the funding, you will most certainly move closer to other forms of funding and towards the release date. That's the real goal of it all really, to reach your players with your work. Just do it!
To be continued!
Sami
Hoodownr
 |
| Haeyundae beach in Korea, let's do a bit of Hoodowning there =) |
