Rockfish's Michael Schade on crowdfunding your game development

yeah it's a bit unusual that I'm standing here in front of you guys for in front of a mobile crowd because our new studio rockfish games between PC and console but there's a reason to that my priors to Rio fishlabs we did mobile games and the most known title was galaxy and fire was a space shooter and then had many many downloads on iOS and yeah we took that to do a Kickstarter campaign and it's actually it's a 30 minutes 45 minutes talk so I really have to rush through the slides a bit so my partner and i we started actually 24 years ago working together as I said we were running with build and we were running fishlabs and now we're doing pc console working with unwieldy for and we took yeah we took our experience and build a prototype of a space shuttle called ever space and launched it on Kickstarter raised roughly half a

million us to Kickstarter or website and other channels and the last big thing was that we signed with Microsoft to bring ever space and have its console you d be on xbox one alright so that's galaxy on fire the notions the the love that we got from Apple ID about 50 million downloads on iOS you got featured a lot so there is an audience out there that loved space shooters and we brought the team that did galaxy fire from fishlabs to rockfish our new studio and the most important thing if you start with the Kickstarter campaign is really take some time and to think how do you position yourself and how do you position your title and in our case we thought well there are great space shooters out there there is a star citizen coming there's no means guy comin II too dangerous out there already and if we go head-to-head against them that's not going to work so we have to find a different approach here and what

we said well we take our mobile experience we do a space shooter that's highly accessible that you can just pick up and play you dive right into the action we don't have a we don't have space in how to say in a naturalistic way so we're not about realism so it's more about beauty its color if you have a very vibrant art style and so we positioned ourselves so if there are the big titles multiplayer pvp physics are as in real space we say no we do it Arkady space shooter we have an arty colorful private art style and we have a roguelike game mechanic as a core and we combine that with Rublev visuals so there was our story here and on top of that we said we also want to have a nonlinear storytelling in a rock like that hasn't been done before at least to our knowledge and those three pillars were the starting point for us

before you do the Kickstarter you have the challenge to get some awareness for your title because obviously if the title is brand new if the studio is new you don't get that hype on Kickstarter tool to get your game funded so we started about four months before we actually launched a Kickstarter campaign so we were working on material we had in game footage we created trailers screenshots animated gifts and such and we build a website that that's it's primarily task was to gather email addresses and by the time we were ready with the Kickstarter campaign we had this first push that we can send out to our follow us and say well the Kickstarter is live if you help us now that'll be great and then you get this initial push and it's very important to get this in the very first two days of the Kickstarter campaign if you search for steam greenlight Kickstarter what's the best timing on the web there are a lot of voices saying you should do your

green light on PC steam while you have the Kickstarter campaign running I understand the reasoning because you get a lot of visibility from steam if you're on the front page and you have a great title that is qualifying for green light while this campaign is running you get a lot of traffic and ideally you can send that traffic to your Kickstarter campaign however we decided to do in an opposite way because we wanted to have the green light campaign a to get even more followers so like email addresses that we really can reach out to those fans and secondly to get an indication if we ride with the concept of the blog like Triple A visuals nonlinear storytelling because it was kind of a new approach to do a space shooter and even if you have a very good strong gut feeling you don't know if you're right and so we use the steam greenlight also for a green light for us internally so is this the right concept does it resonate with our fan base and

such and thank you thankfully it did so we had about seven thousand votes and eighty-nine percent of those guys said yes we like that concept we like the graphics we like the prototype that you're showing and we had a big push and the second thought is you need to have some sort of a success story before you reach out to the to the media because journalists will will rarely write about your Kickstarter campaign there are many reasons for that one is the journalist doesn't know if the game is going to come out one day because there are a lot of ? still is the game going to be funded completely will the team succeed and etc so they're a little bit reluctant to write about Kickstarter stories so you need to have a success story prior to that in our case was the green light and green that with such such strong metrics like as I said 70,000 volts and eighty-nine percent year olds so we used that success so by

the way we got greenlit and so on that was great and we also took the feedback from the community on Steam to alter our Kickstarter campaign to give you an example we thought that VR support in another space is a is a good stretch goal but we got so much feedback during the green light campaign that people said this game needs to have our support and we decided to have we are support as a day one feature and so we changed our campaign so it really gives you the idea where you're standing with your concept and if you if you resonate with the feedback then again you get your strongest ambassadors well we decided to have VR is the first day feature and then those guys will promote you within the community so that's really important another thing we did contrary to what was the recommendation and we launched a Kickstarter campaign at the end of gamescom which is most of you guys

probably know the big one of the biggest video game shows in the world lots of consumer consumer soda but also the press and some said well you shouldn't launched a Kickstarter campaign during a big event because you don't get the coverage while that is true we said the thing is all the journalists are going to be at Gamescom or any other great event anyway so we take that opportunity and reach out to them of course they won't write in that in that moment at that day about us but they will write about us or might write about us the week after and for a Kickstarter campaign in our case was like the show starts on Wednesday and we had our kickstarter campaign thursday night to make sure we get some traction in europe but the biggest attraction you get obviously in the u.s. so you have a full workday in the u.s. so we started thursday night and we used tuesday and thursday to reach out to the media in germany but also international press showed them the prototype explained the

game and such and then some of them wrote about it immediately so perfect timing for the Kickstarter launch and some of them wrote about it the next week and typically in the Kickstarter campaign you get you a big spike in the beginning and then you go to this valley but nothing happens and you want to make sure that during this comma period you have some coverage and it worked exactly as we hoped so the week after gamescom we got the media coverage down ok campaign pillars as I said we spend a lot of time on the campaign itself you can see it on Kickstarter ever space if you search for that you will see a lot of videos you will see a lot of animated gifts and in and in detailed description of the campaign and with all these this great footage that we had out there I think it helped us a lot to really make our fans understand that a we can pull this off we know

exactly what we want and it is it is important that we stick to a vision so you will get a lot of emails to say hey how about this feature wouldn't it be great to have multiplayer wouldn't it be great about whatever and my advice is don't get carried away it's so easy to say well we will have all that because then there's you think that people will what's more likely that they support you but actually it's like if you say well it's a single player game no we won't have multiplayer because a it's too expensive and there are other multiplayer games out there already there are people who love you for that even if they want to have multiplayer they appreciate that you stick to your guns and say no it's a single player game we don't want to dilute the positioning of the game we stick to our guns here it's single player is roguelike that's it it's it's Arcadius not simulation and we think we know what to do so that paid off and yeah of course you have to testify and i

recommend weekly updates with in-depth video showing in-game footage i've seen a lot of campaigns failing and my take is the times we can have a concept and you just have a promise on kickstarter that just over you really have to show you have to prove that you can pull it off ok campaign lunch four minutes left Jesus during the campaign launch you take your email addresses that you have gathered you send it out you hope for this initial push and you make sure that you have a very high conversion which means you have to be very very active on all social media channels you have to answer all the questions ideally in real time and this is also true for the wall and Kickstarter so the backers have a very high expectation that you're really involved and I almost recommend not to sleep it's really cancel all private things you don't have a

don't have a private life there is no there's no partner no friends no sports whatsoever for this time it is so important really to stay on track for that an answer because every time somebody has a question and you go back to them personally and immediately they feel valued and then it's much more likely that they support you financially and to give you an idea how we got a lot of people actually know about the Kickstarter campaign without spending a lot of money we use those animated gifs you might be familiar on kotaku there are a lot of those gifts that you see and we launched them on imager which is a it's a platform where you if you see on facebook those kittens that fall into a trash bin or whatever those funny gifts those are hosted on on imager and while it's not allowed to use that as an advertising platform you can have your own account and you put up cool footage there and then you have to wait that

somebody picks it up and pushes pushes pushes it and if it's good enough then it can how to say it can bubble up to the top and we with this this gift that you're seeing that generated three million views within 24 hours and if you have really high end content this is a very good platform to put it out there it's a bit of luck also timing wise is good so launch it in the AFT early afternoon in europe because then you have the traffic from europe and again from America because is really key that all the traffic goes ideally into one hour you have a push you right about that on Twitter on Facebook and so on and then you have a chance getting a lot of visibility during mid campaign as I said you have this this dip and you have to make sure that you get traction a very good way is to partner up with other Kickstarter campaigns that are live at the same time ideally you find titles then don't cover the same genre

but have the same either they're using the same engine and they have the same appeal in our case we were working with divinity gear and some other titles out there from from smaller studios and you cross promo so if you have an update on Kickstarter you point to them they point to you and to give you an example in the end we had about 11,000 backers and if we were pointing to another title out there we generated around about thousand klicks to another campaign that I personally thought is is attractive and is good and it has to be authentic of course so you can set about ten percent if somebody has a certain amount of backers and if they push you and if they push you in the right way and if it's a good fit you get ten percent of their audience at least see what you do and then again it may be ten percent of those back you and you never know there might be a 1,000 5,000 10,000 u.s. dollar back amongst them so that's important again mid

campaign we did more of those animated gifts in this case we did an album with like five of those generated 6 million views so we did that on a weekly basis almost and when we reached about 99% of our funding goal I sent out an industry newsletter to all my LinkedIn contacts 2,200 people and say well we had 99 percent there because it's so interesting sometimes people that know you're really good they wait and see what's going on but if you add 99% a lot of people think I helped them to get a hundred percent I help them to get the funding so if you really under you're almost there then it's the best time to reach out to your industry friends not in the very beginning because then it's a lot of people are holding back and one of those addresses was email addresses was chris Roberts and he liked the game and he had a fabulous shout out about ever space which obviously wasn't planned but sure that everything we did

in the beginning was just right running out of time here great and so he did a shout-out and a lot of star citizen back as comb came over to us and backed us to if things like that happen the next thing you do our this by the way this is the right slide for this if that happens you know just be grateful you write a press release if you have somebody are so popular supporting you you have a press release you cover that in a video you play that back and you explain to the press why this was a success and every press release we did we provided some stats of the campaign how it went so far conversion rates and such and if there's one thing John it is really love is like detailed information that is not available on the web so provide them some feedback open up your account share our figures and you get a coverage for the press yeah we did one well animated gif this one again went to most popular on reddit three

million views and told all the things that we did in the last week of the campaign contributed to about a third of the whole funding for the campaign we're washing through via so things that we missed we should have had a gamepad control for we are of them we we haven't thought that through clearly enough of course it's crap if you have a VR experience and you still have to use your keyboard that was stupid we should have had more mid to low tears we had too many a couple thousand tears although we were very very successful selling four times the 7000 used here totally unexpected um I haven't seen that coming but we had too many in the thousand rains we should have had more like the in a few hundred or less and we should have had a boxed version and some physical rewards excuse me yeah after

that Kickstarter campaign a lot of doors open up so I can recommend really very close to this success reach out to potential partners publishers OEM platform owners and such for instance where we had a talk with Microsoft they were super excited about the title prior to Kickstarter but when we had the Kickstarter success everything went very quickly and we managed to close the deal with Microsoft within four weeks after Kickstarter success