DOOMSDAY ROBOTS

It might be weird to start a pitch for Gamefound by talking about it’s biggest rival, but the context is important. Kickstarter has a truly massive audience and that audience is actively looking for new exciting games to buy. When my company, Doomsday Robots, ran our last crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, 70% of all of our backers came from Kickstarter directly. If you have an established audience that can back early, Kickstarter boosts visibility of your campaign to an even larger audience increasing your funding ceiling well beyond what your marketing reach is.

But in 2023, Gamefound, not so much. Maybe one day, but it doesn’t appear to have the same base. It’s so much smaller, in fact, that Gamefound essentially requires that you bring your own audience to have any chance of success. An audience that you, as a new publisher, don’t likely have.

So why would I recommend Gamefound for new publishers or for game designers for that matter? Just stay with me.

Let me finally preface this by saying that what I am about to share isn’t a common recommendation. In fact, I can’t think of anyone who doesn’t give the exact opposite advice – to start with Kickstarter. But there is a case to be made for Gamefound and it has everything to do with reduction of risk made possible by their enhanced toolset relative to Kickstarter.

The Kickstarter Gamble

It’s true that Kickstarter has a much higher potential for funding than Gamefound and this is because of its built in audience. But what if Kickstarter’s algorithm never shows your game to anyone else? What if your campaign sits, siloed with almost zero visibility from anyone outside of the backers you brought yourself? This is unfortunately a sad reality for many failed Kickstarter campaigns.

To get seen on Kickstarter, you must hit with a bang! How big of a bang? It depends on who else you are competing with for visibility on a given day. This means it is essential that your Kickstarter campaign put its very best foot forward. Your page must look professional, your art assets: mostly complete, your price: attractive, your shipping: defined, and your funding goal: achievable.

If any single metric is off, it could dramatically reduce your chance of funding and put off a very picky audience who is comparing your viability and trustworthiness as a company to the latest campaign from a more establisher creator with a much bigger budget. The bar is very high.

All of this means that while your campaign can perform better on Kickstarter, it’s going to require a much, much bigger spend up front and a lot more risk. If you have the money needed to pump into a Kickstarter campaign to make it successful, the rest of this isn’t for you.

The Gamefound Opportunity

Gamefound has a way to significant reduce your risk as well as reduce your up front costs, and it does this using its unique tools. The trick is not to launch until you know you will fund, or until you have enough followers to give a reasonable chance of success and Gamefound enables this in ways that Kickstarter doesn’t.

On Gamefound, like Kickstarter, a backer can choose to follow a campaign. Gamefound publicly touts its 40% conversion rate of follower to eventual backer. I’ve only found this to be true if the game also funds. My own observations are that you can get a 10-15% conversion of followers to backers on day 1 of the campaign if you also fund day 1.

How can I used this data to lessen my risk? If I know my campaign needs 100 backers to fund, and I can get 10% of my followers on day 1, it means I need 1,000 followers before launching to reliably fund on day 1. Because you can set a Gamefound campaign page up months (or even years!) before officially launching, you can take as long as you need to hit that magic number of followers you need to fund.

But wait, couldn’t I just do the same thing with Kickstarter and reach a number of “remind me later” people before launching? Sure, but I am not aware of a consistent conversion rate and the people who follow you on Kickstarter haven’t even seen your campaign page! Gamefound minimizes the chance of follower disappointment because you can show your page before you launch.

Gamefound Follower Campaign

Gamefound offers the unique opportunity to build your entire page before you launch your funding campaign. This means potential backers can see your whole page, even see it evolve over time, until you finally officially launch it. This means you can start your page with just the barest of art assets and build your followers as you go. Whereas some might use a separate webpage as a landing page to build an email list, Gamefound lets you skip the middle man and send your potential backers directly to the site where they will eventually purchase the game from you.

But being able to build a page isn’t all that Gamefound offers. It also includes the ability to email updates to followers and engage your followers with a comments section – the same tools available to Kickstarter campaigns – all before you ever launch. This essentially allows to you run a prelaunch campaign, or as I like to call it, a follower campaign.

Gamefound offers another very powerful tool to run a successful follower campaign – exclusive follower rewards. How it works if that you can offer an exclusive follower reward on Gamefound to followers who later back your game. Think of it as a free gift for early supporters. These are not available to backers who were not also followers. It kind of works like an extended early bird, with all the upside, but with a lot less potential for bad blood and FOMO. Follower rewards never appear on the campaign page, so when you launch there is no record of the follower reward. Instead, the follower’s pledge levels include the follower reward built in to them when they pledge.

Because the follower reward and campaign page are mutable prior to launch it opens up a powerful opportunity. Let’s say your original follower reward is an extra exclusive card added to the game. It’s pretty cute, but what you really want to offer is a whole expansion. But you know if you don’t get enough followers, you’ll lose money on the expansion. Because the follower reward is changeable you could always change and upgrade the follower reward once you get enough backers. Hmm, where else have we heard of upgraded rewards based on increased numbers of people?

Follower Stretch Goals

Because followers translate into backers and backers translate into funding, you can reliably assume that more followers means more funding. And more funding means unlocking stretch goals.

To use our prior example, if you need 1,000 followers to successfully fund the most basic version of your game, you might determine that it will take 2,500 followers to successfully fund the very best version of the game. Because of Gamefound’s array of prelaunch tools, a follower campaign could build itself using a follower stretch goal system. The more followers, the more you unlock. This is very powerful for the creator.

Using our prior example, if your follower campaign is struggling to get over the 1,000 followers you need, that’s fine, you can launch the base version of your game and hopefully add more features and opportunities using traditional funding based stretch goals. However if your follower campaign is overshooting your targets and you reach 3,000 followers, that can create an entire paradigm shift for your game. What might that look like?

You might find that at that follower count you can afford to lower the cost of your pledge or even discount shipping! These are usually immutable aspects of a campaign once you launch, but because you are in your follower campaign, you can change your page to reflect your new prices before ever going live with your funding campaign. New followers will be even easier to gain with your new prices and offering. This is just one example – the possibilities of what you can do are truly mind-blowing.

This, of course, is in addition to the fact that Gamefound has other amazing tools after you launch. These include Stretch Pay, Gamefound’s exclusive, very backer friendly, payment plan to take the edge off high priced pledges. And don’t forget the fact that Gamefound combines your funding manager with an industry trusted pledge manager removing the need to convert your Kickstarter base to a new platform to manage add ons, late pledges, shipping charges, and taxes.

Follower Strategy

Brass tax time. I’ve never run one of these campaigns, I simply see the potential of the tools Gamefound has currently available. Because of that I cannot guarantee this will work as intended. However this is the method that I would use to minimize risk when I eventually run my own Gamefound campaign.

Build your page and audience slowly at first. You might have the barest campaign page in history, but you don’t need a big spent up front. A follower earned is a follower saved for launch. If they followed without a flashy presentation, it means they didn’t need it. Collect these people like Pokémon. When the rate of followers added begins to decrease, add to your page, announce a follower goal, or perhaps add a follower reward with an update.

It’s very important not to update too often. Remember your campaign page isn’t live yet, and every email sent is another opportunity for a follower to drop you because they don’t want spam for a game they haven’t paid for yet. This means keeping updates infrequent containing only the most pertinent information – especially that which is built on self-interest – bonuses for your followers.

Continue to refine your campaign page as art assets get made and the offering becomes clearer. Keep driving people to follow your page, and secure them with a decent follower reward while selling them a vision of what you have planned if you can get more followers (the stretch goal).

Once you hit your desired number of followers that you’ve careful calculated, finally launch your Gamefound funding campaign. Because you’ve done your legwork up front, you don’t need to run a long tedious campaign with preplanned stretch goals for momentum either – you did all that up front. The launch is no more than a formalization of the work you’ve already done. Throw a party!

Of course if, in the end, you find you can’t reach the number of followers you need, you can always change strategies and adjust. You don’t have to launch. Or if you wish to go back to Kickstater, simply direct your Gamefound followers that direction instead.

So why did I include Game Designers?

If you are a game designer you might be wondering why I included you in the title of the page. If you’ve read this far you can see he potential if you wanted to try your hand at crowdfunding your own game with minimal risk. But even if you aren’t interested in that, there is a reason for you to use Gamefound.

Gamefound essentially creates up a de facto homepage for your game design complete with the ability to instantly communicate with followers from a centralized place that gamers already frequent! Since you don’t have to launch, you can continue to build your prototype and interest in your design all the while building followers.

Imagine going to a publisher and in your pitch meeting bringing up your de facto homepage on Gamefound complete with links to your how to play video and online demo and sell sheet but with a demonstrable and significant follower count. As a publisher, this would be very interesting to me.

And, sure you could build your own website to accomplish the same, but Gamefound has essentially positioned itself as a potential hub for designers to show off their designs and if you ever do decide to launch, you’ve already done the work of building the followers needed to fund your game.

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What do you think? I’m very interested in your feedback. This is experimental after all and I don’t have all the answers. But I hope this can inspire you to evolve your perception of what crowdfunding can be and expands the range of who can be successful at it.

I should note that I am not an employee of Gamefound nor have any affiliation with them.

Bryn Smith