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Last call for Exotica/Battlecruisers Kickstarter!
We're into the final hour of the kickstarter project for Exotica and Battlecruisers, and as of this writing we've raised $109,205! That's pretty good - surpassing the $103,479 raised for Escalation in April 2013 (oh, my... has it been that long already?)
This EmDo expansion was combined with a standalone game by another designer - Battlecruisers by Philip duBarry. I might have expected Exotica alone to raise about as much as Escalation did, so I might have expected a combined kickstarter to post somewhat higher numbers...
Not that I'm not happy about the funding as it is. In fact, I've been so excited about it that I went ahead and started prototyping the next expansion, Eminent Domain: Oblivion (finally)!
There are plenty of factors that might have led to Exotica not raising as much as Escalation did, and based on the comment threads I suspect people will put these at the top of the list:
* Lack of Exotica-centered stretch goals (Escalation had a series of Scenario and other stretch goals)
* Less dedicated community involvement (I feel like the comment threads were more active all around in the Escalation project)
* Combined project with Battlecruisers (Some backers didn't seem to like the combined project)
* Number and quality of competing KS projects (There are a large number of high profile projects on lately)
* Kickstarter fatigue (it's been 2 years after all...)
So what do you think? Which of these factors do you think affected the funding the most? What other factors do you think applied? What do you think would have benefited this campaign in particular? Let me know in the comments below.
3 comments:
Well, I cannot compare to the Escalation campaign (then I still believed it would be published in german some day...), but I think you could have created more buzz by uploading the artwork you published in the news to the campaign also on BGG, along with a new thread from time to time, displaying new mechanisms, the components, name suggestion thread, what you are working on, maybe a prototype gameplay video... that sort of things. Many people get attracted by games displayed on 'The hotness', and you need 'only' to create clicks to land there. Also a video by some renowned reviewer like Rahdo, the Undead Viking or Dice Tower helps KS campaigns extremely well.
Apart from that, many people wanted more ED:X stretch goals, so if you had prepared the list beforehand (with the for me great goal of wooden VP tokens displayed from the start), maybe more people would have backed.
Though I am a big fan of your work and EmDo, I think more PR work could have raised more money. I do not know how occupied you were in the last two months, so I cannot claim you could have prepared better.
Sincerely and meaning no offense,
Josh 'Dagar'
Thanks Josh - you're right, we didn't have the same video content we often do... no reviews of game play for example. And we didn't really even link to or point out the Print and Play Tasty Testers forums for Exotica!
Posting the art on BGG (as we rolled out those updates) would have been pretty smart as well.
Things to keep in mind for the Oblivion project!
For me it was the uncertainty over EU shipping.
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