Outland 17 - Kickstarter Post-Mortem

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Grenade Tree Games have written a post-mortem on their Kickstarter adventure for Outland 17, that failed in receiving the necessary funds for the game. They mention the things that went well and the things that didn't go well. One of those being unsuccessful in transferring the followers they had on social media into people who actually pledged.

What Didn't Work

• Not Enough Traffic - The most obvious observation: we didn't have a big enough ball rolling at launch, in terms of both community size and media coverage. We underestimated how many followers and email subscribers would convert into backers. Even getting our friends and family to back or even share the project was like herding cats.
• Lack of Context For Goal Amount - We didn't put up our stretch goals so as not to appear presumptuous about the level of success our campaign would have. Our humility was our downfall by not including those goals since it kept people from seeing our entire vision for the game.
  
  Covering licensing fees isn't as "sexy" as saying that their contribution will help get custom animations for the game or bring it to a new platform. End users are more interested in the tactile results they can recognize immediately.
  
  For example, we had an early stretch goal in the wings for Linux development and had mentioned it in the Kickstarter. This was largely missed as we still had comments saying they would support if it had a Linux release. Had we had our stretch goals been more prominently displayed, we could have had a better motivation for backers to support us to try to reach that goal.
• Original Kickstarter Video Had The Wrong Focus - When we launched our Kickstarter we started noticing negative reactions to the video with people watching it and not understanding what the project or the campaign was about. The original one was more about trying to pitch a product and the team as opposed to pitching the game, which is the core of what anyone coming to Kickstarter cared about.
  
  We even had several people claim we were attacking other developers, which was never the intent of the video. We pulled the game trailer to the front burner, finished it and swapped it out but by then the first impressions had been made.
• The Demo Suffered Scope Creep - The demo was originally released with three missions and a handful of abilities players could customize with. By the Kickstarter's launch, it had tripled to nine missions. We had several calls to action in the demo to go to the Kickstarter but because of the size and scope of the demo, it didn't have the focus to create an itch for the player that could only be scratched by the Kickstarter.
• $20 Is Too High - A comment that popped up a couple times toward the end of the campaign was that the base reward to get the game was priced too high at $20.
• Not Enough Team Info - We didn't go into detail about each of the team members, which resulted in people not understanding each person's contributing role.

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The development of the game goes on, with another Kickstarter they plan in the future.