Epic CrowdFunding Marketing and Exposure Services

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

After reading the other thread regarding the revenue share from crowd funded projects i was thinking it would be a great idea for Epic to offer a platform for exposure for CrowdFunded projects utilizing their software.

This would be great for indies looking to get the word out there and would also hopefully generate more profit share for Epic.

Currently if you really want to get the word out about your KickStarter project you have to pay a PR company to run press releases and online marketing as well as get bloggers and gaming news sites to post articles about the project, etc., etc. For a project looking for around $400K as an initial goal you would need to spend at least $5,000-$10,000 on just marketing to really achieve the exposure needed to get the average 14% of conversions to backers.

Since Epic has such great relations with their partners and is well established they could work a deal with the PR/Marketing companies they utilize to offer their services to their ‘clients’ who would be the indie development teams utilizing their software.

Here are just a few ways i think this could work:

  1. Offer a more expensive subscription tier for the engine which would cover exposure and promotion once the project is on KickStarter - I think indie teams would be willing to pay $10-$20 more per month for this because if they are going to put all of that time and energy into the KickStarter project and it does not get exposure it is just a waste of time so this would be a great return on investment for them.
  2. Have a higher profit share percentage for projects who want to utilize Epic’s exposure/promotional services - Once again this would be well worth the while for indie teams.
  3. Have a contingency based percentage model (which KickStarter already utilized) where you agree to pay Epic a percentage of your total funding only if the project meets its initial funding goal in return for Epic’s exposure and promotional services, this would allow Epic to be more discerning as to which projects can utilize their promotional services and give them more of an incentive to get the proper exposure for the project.

In the long run i think this would be a nice business and marketing asset for Epic and put them even farther ahead of the curve with the latest game development business model…

2

Kickstarter and other crowdfunding systems are already pretty awesome, and I don’t think we’d be able to match their capabilities any time soon.

As great-looking games emerge built with UE4, we’re definitely interested in helping promote them here on our web sites and by making introductions. Over the years, we’ve introduced a lot of developers to prospective publishers and distributors, with some good results.

3

Well, Sir Sweeney, you have already made indie developer’s lives much easier with the introduction of your new licensing model and the simply amazing tool set for UE4 and we all thank you for that!

I know that KickStarter is already a great platform but getting the word out about KS projects is still quite pricey for some development teams so i was just offering a possible alternative to dev teams having to fend for themselves when it comes to marketing but i understand that it’s a large undertaking and you also don’t want to step on anyone’s toes :slight_smile:

As for your support for the indies we thank you for helping out as much as you do and i may just have to hold you to the prospect of a publisher introduction once our UE4 powered project is unveiled later this year :wink:

Thanks again for all of the UE4 goodness, we will make sure to put it to good use!

4

I think if anyone needs their own crowdfunding system its steam. That way backers will can automatically get their game when it’s released.

5

We don’t need another crowd funding service, we need a better way to get exposure for crowd funding campaigns so indies can raise the money they need, if no one knows about the campaign they won’t get the backers