Hello,
I ask this question to those of you who have followed projects (or been involved in projects) that have made use of Kickstarter and other related sites.
I would Like to know what realistic earnings are for Indie games. I hear that there are many people who unfortunately request there money back using Paypal and that “most funded” page on kick-starter is inaccurate.
Does anyone know (If an indie game were to generate hype well) what is REALISTIC amount of funding?
I ask this because an investor showed interest in helping our game get off the ground, without this investor, our game would rely on donations to cover all the fees, but, the investors terms were steep and worth considering trying to push our game solo.
I understand this is a very vague post, I am just looking for speculation or even advice from people who have used websites such as Kickstarter.
Depends on a few things. You need hype, you need an already in progress community. You need some decent work to show, I would suggest having a small demo out at least to better your numbers. You need to represent your earnings well like what they will be used for. You need well planned out rewards for backers. I mean its a job in itself to plan well for a Kickstarter. Make sure you ask for your must have funds, like the bear minimum. Because you can get over funded. Remember UE will take 5% on anything UE related like copies of the game etc. Plus KS and Amazon take a small % as well so consider that also in your planning.
You will need to spend money on marketing - Don’t think that you just throw together a really good KS campaign and it will get backers like i have seen a LOT of other people do. If you track visitors to your KS page without running marketing you will see how few people actual visit your page through organic referrals.
Regardless of how great your project looks, your presentation, how many forums you post in, how long you have been showing it off in community forums - If no one knows about the campaign who is going to turn into a backer then it’s all pointless.
For example if you’re trying to get around $400K initial funding you will need to spend around $5K just in marketing (press releases, advertorials, blog posts, etc) which doesn’t include shooting your video, and everything else that goes into creating the actual campaign.
Average conversion rate for a game campaign on KS is about 14% at your entry level funding tier so you can use that in calculating your return on investment and see how much you will need to spend to get the conversions you need for your campaign.
Another thing you may want to do is contact the companies who have run successfully KS campaigns for their games which are somewhat similar to yours and ask what companies they used to promote their KS campaign, most of them use about 3 companies to get the word out after the campaign has launched.
There is an article some place on the net that someone with a successful Kickstarter posted that broke down all of the payouts required after the fact.
Sorry I lost the link but the gist of it all if I remember right the expected return in hand is just a bit less than half the posted goal.
What eats into the goal is things like.
KickStarter taking their cut.
Paying taxes.
Pay outs for premiums.
The thing to keep in mind KS is a one shot deal and 90% of your development costs is in labor so unless everyone is willing to defer to profit sharing your going to eat through you KS funding in just paying out living wages.
Another approach though is to establish a viable and ongoing revenue stream as part of your base planning requirements. Make some kind of Android app or game for under a buck or generates development funds via ads over the course of your project is probably a better option and in my opinion would be easier to set up as well maintain.
The thing I don’t like about KickStarter is it’s becoming to big, with clones popping up all over the place, so I can see the entire idea burning out as a one trick pony.
