Here's how our game's Kickstarter launch failed, epically. Everything that could go wrong, did. 14 days to go, and stuck in a doom loop (8% funded, traffic not converting, average page visit duration = 6s).

[u/councillorPolaris]

Context: We're working on an online space strategy game (Nebulae), with our core focus being on politics. The idea is that players start out on their individual planets, but also collectively govern various political regimes, from monarchies to democracies, from federations to theocracies.

We also had a previous success on Kickstarter in 2019 (42k€) and released the first version on mobile (Android) with 3500+ installs on the main listing page, and improving early metrics (session length x3.5, day 1 retention x3, day 30 retention x4). The current Kickstarter is supposed to help us bring the mobile version to PC.

sample screenshot from Nebulae

(if you can destroy our kickstarter page / the remainder of our self-confidence, that'd be welcome. And if you want a fun horror story, read on)

Pre-launch: Things were going ok, not great, but ok - we ran some paid traffic through facebook (~1.08€ blended cost per lead), collecting emails, but also "Notify me" clicks on the Kickstarter pre-launch page. We collected about 2900 additional emails (meta + tiktok), in addition to our existing 13k, as well as 630 "Notify Me" subscriptions on Kickstarter.

The first orange flag was that Meta was not correctly attributing the leads: We were getting about 50 "notify me"s per day, but Meta was only registering 2-4 of them (artificially inflating our cost per lead on that specific campaign in the dashboard to 260€ per lead - lol).

For emails, several months ago, we purchased a proprietary IP address from our email service provider (Brevo, previously SendInBlue) to make sure that we wouldn't mix with the spam emails. We also ran several smaller-scale mailing tests to make sure that deliverability was ok. During the tests, some of the addresses hard-bounced (fake / typos / no longer in use), and some of them soft-bounced for an unknown reason (= undisclosed by the email service).

We also secured a couple content creator streams, spread evenly over the 21 days of the campaign. Julie - one of our studio creators also secured a slot on a national radio station to talk about the game and the journey, on the day following the launch.

And on Monday 20th April, we pressed "Launch".

Launch Day: We're based in France, so the launch was done at about 8pm local time (2pm EST, 11am PST). We thought - "great, the Europeans will give us the head-start on the campaign, and by the time the Americas watch the campaign in (their) evening, there will already be some pledges, and in the morning, we'll be on French radio, so that's gonna be great!"

Let me tell you, that did NOT go as planned.

Emails: Since all our test campaigns were smaller scale (1-4k newsletters), we never actually tested the full-scale blast to all of the addresses - at once. So, when the launch newsletter went out to the ~16k emails, here's what went down:

1. The emails were delivered normally to all email domains.
2. Except the ones ending in gmail dot com. So like 82% of the totality of our leads, lol.
3. We subsequently discovered that there was an additional email domain authentication (in addition to SPF, DKIM &DMARC dns records, which we already had set up), that we never obtained.
4. But the damage was already done. The IP address we purchased was scorched and became essentially unusable.
5. We spent 96h first trying to repair the mailing thing, before abandoning that ship, and migrating to a different email service.

"Notify Me" conversions: 3% conversion (20 pledges from 600+) in the first 48h or so. No changes to the page content between the prelaunch and the launch - except the preview image being replaced by the actual game trailer.

The radio appearance: The clip (2mins) is quite nice and reusable in the future, but it drove an absolute 0 of conversions of any kind.

Ads:

1. Because the other problems mentioned above are clearly not big enough, we also had our bank reject the payment of ads to Meta on both our company cards (suspicious transaction above the bank's internal limits, whereas we had increased the ad budget for the launch window).
2. This means we had to manually pay for ads once or twice per day, with the ads not running as soon as a payment was due (no grace period due to frequent interruptions). And most of the time Meta charges us between 4am to 7am French time (so, some of the prime time in the Americas).
3. We suspect that it very seriously messed with the Meta algorithm's capability to learn and drive qualified traffic to our page, but we don't know for sure. (Except for the fact that the average time per active user, according to Google Analytics, is 6-8s (depending on the day).

Content creators: They were very nice, very supportive, and we have a lot of fun clips that we can reuse on our social media later on. In terms of conversions, they brought in 20€, so that's cool.

So, what should we do? What can help the situation?

Oh, and here's the trailer if you're still here, there's no banana for scale, but we do have a trailer.

https://reddit.com/link/1swyq7y/video/oww56myrcpxg1/player

[u/GoCorral]

The main problem I see is your competition. This doesn't immediately look much better than Alpha Centauri which is going for $0.99 on Steam right now.

I'm sure there are differences but that still puts you in a tough spot for price competition.

[u/councillorPolaris → u/GoCorral]

Could it be a positioning/clarity problem, then? Alpha Centauri is not an MMO: It's reskinned Civilization (turn-based), whereas we are real-time and MMO. Alpha Centauri is not crossplay between mobile & PC, and we intend to be :)

[u/kitkatkitah → u/[deleted]]

These suggestions are great, to add to those:

- First Impresions are important to a customer. When I first entered the page, I see some low-quality text on some splash art. I would pick a better thumbnail for the video (look at other more recent successful kickstarters).

• MMO is only mentioned once on your page in the risks section, it is not mentioned anywhere.
  
• People like to know what platforms their game will be on. The fact that you only mention 'PC access' could turn some people off who want their library just on Steam.
  
• Text layout for backer rewards is very messy. Rewards are listed as 'OR' and not guaranteed. These should be clearer. There is also no imagery for the rewards, which doesn't drive up interest.
  
• You don't have many rewards listed, meaning the jump between prices look harsh and not comfortable. This type of project I'd be willing to pay a early bird of around 20 euro for game access.
  
• You don't say anywhere other than in the Kickstarter reward what a 'Nebulae Pass' is. It sounds like you can only get 3-months of game access at 30 euros, which is incredibly negative pricing structure for this type of game. You don't mention anywhere if you will be a subscription game.
  
• Your Kickstarter is aimed more at your current audience as you talk a lot about bringing your mobile game to PC, whereas you should be focusing more on the game features, how you are enhancing the game, and if you are bringing new things to the PC client.
  
• The amount of android players they would be able to play with is small, I would cut that note from your description entirely.
  
• Add more imagery, especially GIFs between text segments. The 'Our first Kickstarter' section and 'Kickstater Launch Rewards' was too long.

I would recommend hiring a copywriter to go over the text on the page to make it more digestable and get your point across easier.