Michael Mindes of Tasty Minstrel Games has put together a video with his thoughts about how to have a successful Kickstarter campaign. To me the most important idea he discusses is building a community for your publication. You can see this in most of the highly successful campaigns – D-Day Dice, Alien Frontiers and the Factions expansion, and the amazing campaign of Double Fine’s Adventure!. Each built an exciting community around their product that feed off itself and was viral, bringing in even more backers. They created that sense of ‘I need to be a part of this.’ and ‘I don’t want to be left out.’. This desire to be a part of something cool is sometimes a very strong motivator.
Michael also talks about the importance of the video. This is the hook and is essential to getting those on the border and looky-loos interested in your project. You can see Michael’s talk below.
GamerChris also has some interesting thoughts about Kickstarter from the viewpoint of a backer. He also talks about the band wagon syndrome and how strong it is. You can read his post here. Chris gives an overview of what Kickstarter does. He discusses the risk involved with Kickstarter both for the publisher and the backer. One point that he goes into is the mystery of the product, that the backer really is going on faith that he will get a good product. This is a really important point. This is a very valid point. With Kickstarter backers are ‘buying’ something basically sight unseen. In many cases it’s the two things that Michael mentions, that community around a product and the video, that allay that fear or apprehension. Chris has some more ideas about Kickstarter that you should check out.
Go Forth And Game 