Convincing people to back your Kickstarter campaign is tough, especially for products like video games, which could take several years to release and might not be able to include all of the features that were originally promised. Of course, there are games that are successfully funded through Kickstarter all the time, and in a recent article for GamesIndustry.biz, Luke Crane, Head of Games for Kickstarter, outlined the secrets behind creating and running a successful video game crowdfunding campaign.

“If the hardest thing is having a good idea, the second hardest is expressing it,” Crane said. “Putting together a story that explains the rationale behind your game, shows off the genius of your idea and excites other people isn’t easy. Here’s the thing, though: you can get better with practice.”

Crane said that game makers should try to condense the entire premise for their game into a tweet-length pitch, which he says can grab potential backers’ interest long enough to get them to read further.

Bring Your Own Community

While Kickstarter can be used to reach new people, Crane said that it is not great for building a community from scratch, which is why he suggests working on creating a community, even a small one, before launching a campaign.

“Kickstarter is a powerful community building tool, but it’s most effective when you’ve already spent time building an interested community around your project,” he said.

“If you’ve released games before you should have an existing base. If not, you can still build an interested following in any number of ways. If you can do this your Kickstarter campaign will have immediate momentum, because it offers your nascent fanbase another way to engage with and support you, as well as new ways for you to respond to and reward them in return.”

“Your backers deserve complete honesty and transparency”

Once you have solved that chicken-and-egg problem, Crane says it is extremely important to respect the community you have built.

“As I mentioned previously, games are a more tight-knit community than perhaps any other Kickstarter category,” Crane said. “When someone backs a games project it’s usually about more than just pledging funds to a creator in the expectation of a material reward. As such, your backers deserve complete honesty and transparency, and regular updates on how it’s all going.”

Crane noted that even for a failed campaign, remaining honest and transparent can go a long way to maintaining a relationship with backers, who may return for future campaigns.

“As our recent fulfilment report found, while 73 per cent of backers of a failed project agreed or strongly agreed they would back another Kickstarter, only 19 per cent of backers of failed projects would back another by the same creator. Please note: that latter figure is an average, and it will be higher for creators that communicated well and ensured backers understood in detail what went wrong.”

“Of the 1 in 10 Kickstarter projects that ultimately don’t deliver, it’s fair to say there are still good and bad failures.”

You can read Crane’s full guide for running a successful campaign on GamesIndustry.biz.

Photo by free pictures of money