A House of Many Doors - Kickstarter Post-Mortem

Pixeltrickery Games looks back at the A House With Many Doors Kickstarter:

“Oh Good, Another Kickstarter Post-mortem”: The ‘A House of Many Doors’ Kickstarter Post-Mortem

So I got over 300% funded on Kickstarter! Here is the post-mortem. It was inevitable.

My initial goal was very small (£4000), and even 300% of that is still a quite tiny budget on which to make a quite large game. But the Kickstarter can still only be described as a success, and all thanks to the goodwill of a bunch of amazing people.

The result

I asked for a very specific amount of money because I knew I would be able to make the game with that amount – I wasn’t making a lowball estimate and hoping for a 300% response. That would have been madness. I genuinely expected to only get £4000, or perhaps as high as £6000 if everything went very well, and I planned my tiny budget accordingly.

Now that I have three times what I expected, I can do a lot more than I thought possible. Even better, the Kickstarter has been a success in other, less immediately obvious ways. It’s raised the game’s profile in places that I never dared hope for – with articles in RPS, PC Gamer and Eurogamer, no less – and it helped to bolster my confidence, confirming that there are people out there who are interested in weird exploration RPGs with procedurally-generated poetry and trains that crawl.

Best of all, though? I reached over 1000 people. If you go on Kickstarter and look at other Games projects, you’ll realize that this is a very respectable number – many projects which raised much more than I did actually have a similar number of backers, or sometimes fewer! Perhaps they designed their reward-tiers better than I did – I avoided physical rewards for the most part, as I didn’t have the time, money or inclination to ship t-shirts around the globe, and I’ve noticed that other Kickstarters with physical rewards have definitely been able to entice people to higher tiers. But this wasn’t an option for me.

On the other hand, though, my low reward-tiers might have been what helped bring more people in. And I think having evidence that over 1000 people interested in what I’m doing is its own reward, to be honest – I’d rather have 1000 people pledging a fiver each than 200 pledging twenty quid each. The raw economics is the same, sure, but creatively there’s a huge difference when you know your work will be reaching a lot of people. And there have even been some familiar names among the backers – some writers whose work I’ve respected for years! It’s all a little daunting, to be honest, but also tremendously exciting.

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Thanks Eye!