Why You Can't Crowdfund Video Games | Design Club

Hi Janet. There's a funny thing that just happened and I'm really sorry you missed it. Uh, all right. Hello everyone. Uh, it's it's an interesting Thursday for industry news. By the way, Jeff, I don't know if you've you've seen I've been working all morning. Okay, great. So, let's let's catch you up. We'll do we'll do a little susant of industry news before we get into our topic. All right. Uh, number one, Xbox has announced that the price of consoles and games will be going up before holiday 2025. They are raising the price of consoles about $80. Uh, and they are also raising uh the price of firstparty Xbox games to $80. Uh, and that will be kicking in, I believe, over the summer. So that's that is a thing that uh the industry is drifting to be in line with Nintendo more or less. Although the Xboxes are both I believe still more expensive than the Switch 2, which is kind of fair cuz

it's been the writing and Matt and I have talked about this extensively. The writing has sort of been on the wall that Microsoft doesn't super care about the physical Xbox platform as much as they care about publishing games and getting people into the Game Pass ecosystem and doing that. Uh subscription good. Yeah. Uh subscription good. Uh and then the other one is uh that uh there was just a acquisition and mass firing over at Polygon. Uh Polygon uh got sold off and the new owners immediately laid most of the staff at Polygon off. Uh which begs the question, why did they buy it? That's a really great question, Jeff. And the answer is none of those answers are good. None of like none of the potential answers for why you buy a media outlet and then gut it are in my opinion great for consumers. So well we'll see how it goes. Zariah, thank you so much for the 72 months over here on Twitch. Um I mean yeah Darter brings up Darter brings up a

great point, right? That um it's totally because Xbox console sales were doing so well. I mean, that's not this far into the console cycle, though. Like, right. Well, it it's it will be impossible to compare either PS5 or Xbox sales at any current gen Xbox sales at any point during their run to Switch 2 sales for a whole host of reasons, right? The timing and supply chain issues of both the Xbox and PlayStation 5 is very different than the Switch. The Switch is launching in the middle of tariff central, which is great. It's launching into a probable American recession. Just great, right? But also, uh, people have a lot of emotional attachment to the Switch family because it got a lot of people through co. So there's it's they're not directly comparable. I think also again, Microsoft has the whole ecosystem thing that they're really pushing for, right? That's that was the whole point of the this is an Xbox ad series, right?

Um, so yeah, uh, I bought it so I could man dismantle it. Exactly, Adam. Exactly. That's precisely it most likely. And I mean, the brand name of Polygon is worth quite a bit on its own, right? They've stood as a reputable source for games journalism for a while. And of course, the real concern is where are those people going to go get jobs now? And I hope they all get jobs someplace soon because game, as someone who talks a lot about news in the gaming industry, I really like when there's reputable, wellressearched sources for talking about news in the gaming industry, right? Yeah. Um Oh, yeah. Uh all right. So, the plan for today, chat, and you can be thinking about this while we get through ads here on Twitch. Um the

uh the plan is we're going to be talking about crowdfunding. So most of this is going to focus on Kickstarter because Kickstarter is the most common way that stuff gets crowdfunded, but it'll encompass others. So as we're doing this, I want you all to think about the the video game that you were excited to kickstart that actually delivered in the way that you wanted it to. I got one but okay yeah does that exist right because uh our topic today is why you can't crowdfund video games and there the obvious what is people have crowdfunded video games for a long time and that's true sort of but but people have run crowdfunded campaigns so we'll talk more about that in a bit but I do uh I do want to put in your minds that the thing that you can be thinking about today is Kickstarters or other crowdfunding efforts for video games, what you participated in, why you participated in it, what you got out of it, right? How long it was between when

you kickstarted it and when the game came out. Um, there's a special place in my heart for uh the the the doomed I don't know that they're I'm not going to say that they're all necessarily doomed, but most of them at this point have been doomed. Uh MMOs that hit Kickstarter, right? MMOs on Kickstarter is just like, "Yeah, we're gonna form this new openw world thing with like all of this stuff and and then you never hear from them again, right?" Um, yeah. Okay. So, uh, Zach has a really great example, uh, but I I'm going to I'm going to specifically call this out because I think it's really great. Um, Zach brought up not a video game. We're specifically talking about video games here and a bunch of the concerns and problems are about video games. So, when we get started, we're going to make sure that we're focused very heavily on video games. We are going to talk, we'll have a supplement at the end where we talk about board game, card game, tabletop, correct? And how specifically some of

the problems that games have for why you can't kickstart them. And there's going to be an asterric after this, but um exist in different ways for different kinds of games. Yeah, exactly. and why I'm sort of eternally frustrated that Kickstarter's games category is just g is is all games when video games and tabletop games are two of their top crowdfunding brackets and each should probably have their own but they're not. All right, so we'll talk about that in a bit. Um, there's a certain mention that we must get out of the way. Potato salad. Yeah, I don't want potato salad in the episode, but yes, potato salad. Uh, the The best Kickstarter ever, Jeff, was a Kickstarter by a guy who wanted to make some potato salad. And his goal was like $50. And he ended up making several thousand to make potato salad and then like live streamed making and eating the

potato salad and like sent people commemorative postcards in honor of that batch of potato salad. And it was sort of a meta commentary on the nature of crowdfunding. See, some things like that actually I believe have a better chance. Yeah. Than absolutely because it players did it because they were going along for the ride. Excuse me. Thunders did it. like um there was a Shark Tank pitch years and years ago for a company called I Want to Draw a Cat for You and this guy walked out and basically did literally a song and dance routine which was so like bad BBOP movie which was music which basically just said I want to draw a cat for you and this guy was commissioned on the internet to draw bad cat sketches and then send them to people and he got funded because Mark Cuban thought it was hilarious and realized that what the guy really was was just providing entertainment. Yeah. And that it was

kind of that same as the potato salad thing. Yes. Yeah. Not we're we're going to we're going to have a special caveat carve out for novelty for sure. So I'm 90% sure it was funded by Cuban. It's been a while since I've seen that episode, but that's irrelevant. Yeah. Okay, cool. So, uh be thinking about those things. We're done with ads on Twitch. We're all here. We're ready. We're going to talk about crowdfunding. So, let's go to black and then we'll start this episode. So, uh if you haven't been here, don't panic. We're just going to go to black so I can start a clean recording for our friends over at Nebula and then we'll start the show. I see a Twitch and YouTube stream and I want to paint black. That exactly. That's 100% it. All right. Black [Music] Good time zone, internet. Hello and welcome to Design Club, the only game design show on the internet where we've officially adopted summer attire cuz

it's too warm here for hoodies. Uh I am your humble internet host, Will, joined as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people, Jeff. Hi to the people, Jeff. Hey everybody, I am Jeffrey Zetkin. I am the studio director of Extra Credits and Extra History and long, longtime game designer, 20 plus years. And today, well, you look like you turn slightly older every time I say 20 plus years. Listen, listen. It's the gray and the beard. It keeps like every time I do this, right? It and it's not Twitch chat, right? Hi everyone. I'm Will, your resident analysis enthusiast and voice of the people here on uh Twitch and YouTube for all things live streaming. Um, yeah. So, today, as as you may have guessed by the title, we're talking about crowdfunding. Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. That's right. So, actually, if you're launching a Kickstarter, you always launch it on a Tuesday, unless it's the first day of the month, in which happens to be a Monday, in which case you launch it on the Monday. Fascinating. That is an absolutely

fascinating Yeah, we uh Oh, sorry. I I've been diving deep into some of this cuz last year we did a Kickstarter for our extra history calendar, which is behind my green screen. I should have had it right here to show it off, which was a was and is a beautiful calendar that you can buy in our store. But specifically, I'd done a lot of consulting on Kickstarters before, but this was the first time I'd actually ran one. Mhm. Excuse me. With the team. Yeah. Kickstarters are almost never and should never be solo person affairs. No. But crowdfunding to put out a thing is takes work. It is time consuming. It is not a free thing. And we can get to a little bit about why of it. Yeah. Well, I mean, let let's I mean, we can cast our mind back, right? We were talking a little bit in the pre-show about the potato salad Kickstarter, right? Crowdfunding has evolved into a much more um sophisticated part of the gaming

industry than it was back in May day. Right. I remember I remember the the days of infinite stretch goals and people not really knowing how to format a campaign or what pledge levels look like or like people or you shouldn't do too much physical merch because you're going to end up losing money because they added a thing at the spur of the moment and suddenly realized that that $5 add-on they were doing was going to bring their their Kickstarter to unprofitability. Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff, right? But we we've come a really long way from since then. But one of the actually keep going for a second. I'm going to bring the calendar on screen because people are talking about it in chat. Okay, great. Um, so while Jeff grabs the calendar, so the thing that we've been asking people, uh, in the Discord for our patrons and subscribers, uh, and channel members, uh, and here in in chat, live chat, has been what? We want to frame your thinking about this in what was the last

video game, not tabletop game. We'll get to that later. Video game Kickstarter that you backed that you were happy with. All right. Hold on. Let's see here. What is May? Yeah, you should show off May. It just was April. Whoops. It's upside down. Okay, great. Awesome. Yeah. Uh, which was our worst moms and dads playing poker. And let's flip over to May. Oh, May is Elanor with a Parasol. Yeah. Which was when David tackled um what is this? Monae. That's a Monae. Funny. I wrote all of these, but I have a child and have not slept a lot. Yeah. But beautiful custom art for all though I'll have to say February is still with the glint. Oh yeah, the lovers. Still one of my favorites. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so um we should probably issue a clarification, right? Because I've got an excellent comment here from YouTube. Crowdfunding as in Kickstarter, not

Patreon. Yes, we're talking very good clarification that we should probably get out of the way right at the top. Thank you for that, Goldie. We're talking about a crowdfunding a short-term timelimited crowdfunding campaign, right? Like a kickstart versus Patreon, which is let me Patreon and Kickstarter. I'm going to use Kickstarter and crowdfunding interchangeably for this. Yeah. The goal of Patreon is to say, here's a group making content that I like. I'm going to chip in. Hold on. I didn't silence my phone. Silence phone stay. The goal of a Patreon is to say, "Here is a group doing stuff I like. I'm going to give them a little bit of money every month along with lots of other people so that together we can help fund them to continue making the thing that we like because the due to the fact that they have a kick a Patreon, it probably means without that it is not sustainable for them to do this as a part-time or full-time thing." Yeah. And so as

opposed to one or two people paying large amounts for it, a whole bunch of people chip in little bits on a monthly basis, right? They are not expecting to get, for example, a finished game at the end of somebody's Patreon in most cases, right? It's a it's for example. Oh, go ahead. It's ongoing art, right? It Patreon is much more like sponsoring an ongoing artist or an ongoing streamer, an ongoing studio rather than going towards a specific finished goal. So, for example, extra history and extra credits together runs a Patreon. And specifically for history, what our patrons get to do is help vote on the topics that we will cover in the future. Both proposed topics and vote on them. Mhm. This isn't a oneanddone. This is, hey, we're making an ongoing show and YouTube revenue alone isn't enough. Yeah. And people like history, so they chip in. Yep. So, that's a thing. On the other hand, you get a Kickstarter or a crowdfunding, which is let's go make Hecnommancer, right? And out of

that, what you expect from what you pledge with your crowdfunding, you expect to at the end receive a copy of Hectomancer, it is a one-time payment in return for which you get that plus other possible stretch goals. You might be or when Matt goes and does dwarven forge, he expects to get a box full of dwarven forge that weighs more than showing up in the mail at some point. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um importantly, right? Uh the and those those those extra rewards are range from everything, right? It could be your your pet snake will appear in Hecnommancer to we'll make you into a snake and you appear in Hecnommancer to whatever. But all of those all of those rewards uh in the case of video games are sort of ancillary to you will receive a video game that resembles the thing that you were pitched in the crowdfunding campaign that is playable on a system that is currently relevant. Uh with few exceptions for like retro

game Kickstarters, right? But like that's the general goal of a video game Kickstarter specifically, right? I think we can agree on that. And I am going to So Will, what's our title? Why you can't crowdfund video games? Yeah. And so Will, are there a lot of crowdfunded video games? There are a lot of video games which have had crowdfunding campaigns run for them, right? But if we are looking at the crowdfund, the name of it or the premise from Kickstarter, I am raising money to make a game. This implies that the game is getting funded by either the Kickstarter or the crowdfunding. Yeah. Like as per the name that you know it's like we're going to go make Hecnommancer, right? We are doing a we're going to go run a Kickstarter for it. We're going to raise $100,000 on that and we're going to go

make the game. Right. So, just straight up as somebody with 20 plus years in development, this works like 1% of the time. Correct. Yeah. That you fund the game through the money that comes in through crowdfunding. There are plenty of other reasons to run these things and we'll get into that and we'll talk about also why the economics don't work. But at a very high level, you cannot fund a video game through crowdfunding. You cannot raise enough money. Yeah. To me, 99% of the time, there will always be exceptions. We'll mention a couple of them. Right. We we've got some I've I've uh I've spent a fair amount of time uh diving into and I have a a a wide array of examples of different Kickstarters um that were success that were all successfully funded for the amount that they asked for originally. We'll talk about that briefly. Um and were all successful in

different degrees and in different ways. And let me just let me bring this in here real quick. Hey um everybody watching this is because games cost more to develop than you can raise on Kickstarter. Yeah. And I think I think saying that again cost more to develop than you can raise on Kickstarter. And there are exceptions. If you have a game that, let's see, hold on. Just like Goldie said, if you have a game that makes 100,000 people for brings in 100,000 for two people for one year, depending where you live, that can be a successful thing. But most games have more than two people, take more than a year. And therefore, when you do the economics, and I made Will go get a whiteboard or blackboard. We're in a sketch on for this today, the economics of what it costs to make versus how much you can raise off of crowdfunding with very rare exceptions do not work, right?

And and I think it's really important that we as consumers understand that, right? Because I think there is I think Star Citizen is probably the flagship example, right, for and punag intended. Um, so Star Citizen, for those not in the know, raised a lot of money on Kickstarter and the reason I'm not giving a number is because it's not really the bulk of it. They also crowdfunded independently at the same time and have raised millions and millions of dollars for a game that is still in active development asterisk, right? There's um there is a bunch of stuff with that, right? And so people are uh saying the the most common thing that we hear with um about Star Citizen is they've raised all this money. Why isn't the game done? And the answer is because the amount of money they've raised versus the game that they've set out to make are inongruous.

They're like, and we'll get to that because that is and this is also, by the way, not me saying do not do not not back games on Kickstarter or crowdfunding. You should, but what I'm what today's episode is about is understanding what's actually going on. Yeah. so that you as a person who likes games can make an informed choice and you know what you're actually buying. Yeah, I think that's a great goal. So, so let me give a tiny bit of history here. For a while, people actually made good faith on I'm going to go fund my game on Kickstarter. But one of the problems with this besides everything else is that Kickstarter's audiences have become increasingly sophisticated. You used to be able to go and you could pitch an idea. Here is my idea for a game. I would like people to give me money for this. So many of those failed that as and the audience got sophisticated from

this. Hey, not every pitch is going to turn into a cool thing or come out that they've started to look for more. They want more than a pitch. They maybe want might want to see a demo of the game, concept art, footage, maybe that it's playable at a certain point like you can see, you know, here's the alpha build of a thing. If you are trying to fund development of your game, by its very nature, that means you don't have the money yet, right? Or theoretically, you don't. So, you can't have an alpha of your game or highle concept art or other things because you do not have the money to make that. and people no longer fund things that they can't see that a good portion of it exists. And part of that is the general trend in Kickstarter that has moved away from um sort of the what I'll call the Patreon model into the pre-order model, right? So the Patreon model is I'm supporting this thing because I think it's cool and I want it to exist, right? And I might get a benefit like voting on episode topics. And the pre-order model is I'm gonna

wait three years and then I'm gonna get this really cool shiny thing at a discounted rate because I helped support it on Kickstarter, which is pretty common. But and part of that premise is I want this game. It's still the I want this game to exist. I am willing to give my money 3 years early. Correct. And hope it comes out. Correct. And the expectation is now much more um I think at least as someone who's uh friends and who has backed a lot of Kickstarters, the expectation is now much more um that there will be a onetoone correlation between what's pitched and what's delivered. There's less room for deviation and expectation in the Kickstarter audience because of that level of sophistication you're talking about. Right. Before there were games that were like, "Hey, this game is gonna be green and then you come out and you're like, it's actually turquoise and kind of blue and everyone's like, "Oh, that's how cheeky that is. What an

interesting change." And now people are like, "Back to green game. Back to green game and the game's blue. What have you done? This game is a failure because it's not a green game, right?" and like not um giving room for the drift that is a natural part of development as you figure out what can and can't be done and new ideas and that's one of the tricky parts of pitching early too is I can tell you from having made lots of games the game you set out to make and the game that gets made are very rarely exactly along the way because as you start playing your own game and designing it you have additional ideas you're like oh we could make it better for this oh this thing we thought of won't work because the frame rate can never get to the point we need it to because we wanted to show too much therefore we have to change. You know, there's all of these things that happen during development. Mhm. But part of it too um is again how much people want to see. Like if we were pitching this calendar 10 years ago, we could have said we're going to go make a history

calendar based with the art style of our show and we're going to redraw famous art into the art style of our beans. We're going to have a history factoid every day and people would have been like cool. When we did our Kickstarter last last year, we had 10 of the 13 months done. The art was done that we could show off. We had mockup screens of exactly what it was going to look at with factoids for every single day. We were showing the postcards and the digital art. like we had 90% of the calendar done because that's what it would take to show off and get people excited to come pledge and do the Kickstarter for the calendar. And one of the things that's important to keep in mind is that that amount of that percentage of the finished product being delivered to the consumer is what is expected. even though the amount of work it takes to get to that percentage of the finished product varies greatly by

product type, right? So, for instance, much harder to make a an alpha or a demo or a vertical slice of a game than it is to do all of the planning for the Kickstarter, right? because you need a certain amount of assets and time and programs and knowhow in order to do the vertical slice in a way that you don't you don't need as much um as many pre-erequisite uh costs to design a calendar, right? The the big straight up Yeah. But hey, Will, can you give me a couple of good examples of some high-end Kickstarter games? Yeah. So, uh let's I want to be small while you say this. Oh. Oh, you want you we want to you want Actually, never mind. Are you No, no, it's fine. We can do this. Okay, so I shrunk. Wow, look at how big the game cups are now, Will. Yeah, I know. I know. I You know how much latte I could fit in one of those? One day I'll uh I'll figure it out. All right, so number one, uh Bloodstained Ritual of the Night

raised $5.5 million. Okay. And uh it did that in 2015. That's probably one of the best examples of a big Kickstarter. However, uh I've got two more. Ashes of Creation, uh which is an MMO. That's very important to keep in mind. Ashes of Creation is an MMO that raised 3.27 million. Mhm. Uh in 2017. Well, quick question. Will we be able to keep this screen and come back to it later? Mhm. We can do that. Okay. And then uh yeah yeah yeah. And then uh last up is a game that has been mentioned multiple times in chat already. Mighty number nine. Nine not zero. Nine raised uh oh sorry this is wrong. I got my numbers mixed up. Ash of creation no Ash of Creation did raise that. Uh Mighty Number N raised 3.84 million.

Okay. And that was in 2013. And this is uh by the way, Mighty Number Nine did not launch to the critical acclaim it was expecting. So I don't actually remember that one. I know the other two. There are reasons for that. Right. Well, and that's and that's actually a really good point. That is a really good point that Jeff just made. One of the problems and I've chosen this selection of games that we're going to talk about in their funding levels um that's really important is uh there's a massive amount of recency bias and survivorship bias when we think about crowdfunding, right? Because uh plenty of crowdfunding campaigns fail. In fact, so many fail that Kickstarter generally won't give numbers for it because they don't want you to think about it. They're like, "Yeah, a whole if you raise more than 20% of your goal, 79% of Kickstarters succeed, which is like the most weirdly specific

uh number, right? If you raise more than 20% of your goal, 79% of Kickstarters succeed." Oh, actually, there's a reason for that. There's if you look at the pie chart of like I used to do some of this for my awesome video game data talks on because Kickstarter has a tiny tab at the bottom where they'll show you a whole bunch of data for their different categories. And part of that was a trend that basically said so many games have such trouble getting any audience at all that the person just thinks I need to put up a Kickstarter and people will magically appear. Yep. that what they're saying really is look, if you can do the leg work to get people in excited about your game, you know, if you can get 20% funded, at that point there's a 79% chance you'll actually go all the way to 100% funded. Y but that also shows how many people then if you look at the total numbers couldn't even hit that 20% because maybe their presentation sucked. Maybe they, you

know, couldn't get people interested. they've done no like marketing or outreach to bring people in. Um, and that's part of as we get to like one of the ones on your medium list. Actually, do that. Do Banner Saga. Okay. So, Banner Saga 3. So, again, this is three. This is not Banner Saga 1. This is the third game in the installment. This is People have played number one and two and were they were both wellreceived games, right? Raised 416K in 2017. Yep. So, just under half a million dollars, right? Uh, Blasphemous, uh, which has gone on to be a muchbeloved, incredibly grim dark Metroid vania, if you're not familiar with it, uh, raised 333K. So, half of the money that we really wish that it would have raised for a really funny joke about a blasphemous video game, but unfortunately, uh, they raised that in 2017. And then, uh, the this is actually one of the more recent ones that's still in development. Um, most of these have come

out or have come out and tanked. Um, Solar Punk is still upcoming. They raised 344K in 2023. I should also point out at this point um several of these, if you go look at these Kickstarters are uh in non US currencies. I've translated all of them to US dollars just to make the comparison easier. Yes, there are problems with doing that with today's conversion rate versus But we're in the right ballpark. We're in ballpark. All we're talking here is ballpark. Yep. Honestly, even if we were off by 20%. Yeah. On any of these, we would still be in the right ballpark. Yep. Will you are missing a dash between solar punk and the revenue? I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Jeff. There I fix and I'm missing a word in or I'm put in in some of them and not I will fix my formatting, Jeff. I'm so sorry. Okay. Could you actually do me a favor which is going to help just because of the numbers? Put a dollar sign in front of the revenue portion. Yeah, you can do that just for people

coming in late kind of thing. Okay. So, while I'm working on that, so these are all medium tier games. These are if you search by most funded in video games, these are 10 to 20 pages in. Um, they're not uncommon, right? But there the these are what I would say are uh a decent chunk of the games that people consider successful versus Bloodstained which is the number two game ever funded in video games. So it's also worth noting the second most funded game ever in video games. Could you put that like a number two in front of Bloodstained or something just so we know that that's like our I'm Did it say how many games have raised more than a million? Uh, or is there I could probably go poke around and find out while we're talking. Um, if that's a piece of data that's of interest. I'm just kind of curious like um I'm curious of the game.

Yeah, of of the game. You're a welcome grass for getting Will to do some formatting. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, wasn't uh someone asked, "Wasn't Shovel Knight a Kickstarter game?" Yes, we're not talking about every Kickstarter game. We're talking about a selection of games that I found to talk about. Wonder how much we could um actually maybe somebody could chat could look up what Shovel Knight raised. Yeah. Oh dear. Uh, and then again I will at this point once again bring up my grievance that video games are part of the games category on Kickstarter and don't have their own category. Uh, which makes it incredibly difficult to parse this data. Also, we could even say of the game I would actually also hazard a bet that at least 75% of the high-end things will represent video games. Actually, maybe not. I wonder what that distribution is.

Part of the problem, too, is that Kickstarter doesn't publish a lot of this data and a lot of it is uh they publish aggregate views, correct? Oh, god. This is also like a trip down memory lane. Who remembers War Machine Tactics? Oh yeah, that was right around a million dollars. 1.5 mil. So, we're getting there. Oh, okay. We got a number from Alex of Ohio for Shovel Knight. Okay, I will I will stick that in there. Shovel Knight was 311,000. Okay. So, um, also let's talk about that of goal number, right? And why that's not Oh, why that's Will Should I Should I talk about behind the curtain for that? Yeah, let's talk about that real quick and why we're not mentioning the goal number for most of these. So, there's an interesting psychological thing which is people because Kickstarter will not give you a thing until it's funded. Like, you'll get a refund. People have realized that they

should set their goal really, really low. If it costs you a million dollars to make a game, I'm just pulling a number out of an air for a moment, but you really want money. You might set your goal at say 25,000 because that way if you only get a h 100,000 though you want a million you still get that 100,000. If you set the goal to a million and you raise 750,000 you would still get zero money. So remember the incentive for the person running this money only received if money equals greater than the goal. Therefore, over time, people have started setting their goal lower and lower and lower and lower to make sure that they get at least some of the money. If you think you need a million dollars to make your game, you're still pretty happy to get $250,000 of it because that means that you have that much to go make with while you're looking for other funding. Yeah.

Therefore, people will do something like like Shovel Knight setting at 75,000 is actually fairly high. I've seen a lot of games that would cost a good amount of money setting themselves at something like 25 or 50,000. And I think for consumers who aren't aware of the real cost of game development, that really skews their perception because they're unaware that there's behindthe-scenes math to help the studio fund is in place. So they believe, ah, yes, this video game really only does cost $25,000. Hey, look, it's a 2D cell-shaded game. How much could that cost? Right. Exactly. So, um, okay. I so yeah when you Oh, go ahead. I I went and looked. It's round about 60 games have made a million dollars or more in video game in the video game category specifically. Can't find an exact number. Does it give a number like currency valuations and uh a

bunch of other stuff, but it's about there. I'm on page five by sorted by most funded. I'm on page five and I found the last game that made a million dollars and it's about how many? Uh there's uh about 60 total. Okay. Yeah, cool. That's a good number for us to remember. Actually, could you type maybe type that at the top? 60 plus games and put it here. Oh, 60ish games greater than $1 million. Games over uh I can't find the dollar sign on my keyboard. Why? Because I'm just bad at typing apparently. And this would be over a 20-year period. Kickstarter goes back to at least I was Kickstarting things in 2011. So more. Oh, no. That's No. Huh? I can't do math. That's 16 years. That's 16 years. Like let's But I think we'll say at least 16

years. At least 15 years. Yeah. Right. Okay. Okay. So, what we're looking at is maybe four games a year if we averaged it out have done that, right? Um anyway, so going back to the pledge amount. So, because you only get the money if your funding goal is hit, the other one is everybody loves the stat funded in less than an hour or funded in less than a day. This is also an incentive to set your funding your minimum very low cuz say you think you're going to raise say you think you're doing a history calendar will like I bet we could get at least you know $5,000 in our first hour. Let's set our funding goal at 5,000 because then we're going to be able to say funded in an hour and people can be like wow this must be a really popular calendar. It was funded in an hour, right? And uh this is another great example. Uh Ryan asks, "Are you allowed to pledge on your own campaign?"

No, you're the account that made the campaign is not allowed to pledge on the campaign, but this has happened in a bunch of places. Um, and you can look into it in different Kickstarters, and I have no value judgment on this idea, but there have definitely been plenty of Kickstarters that have had large anonymous donations immediately before key break points in time or key goals in or they just random big anonymous pledges. Do with that information as you will. I'm not going to get too tinful a hat about it, but no, you're not allowed to pledge with the account that made the Kickstarter directly, but it happens straight up. So, what you're saying is, I'm going to give my X% of money that Kickstarter charges, that couple percents to Kickstarter in return for getting all the rest of the pledge money. Yeah. Like that is what it that is your trade-off. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, really quickly since I can answer this.

Um, oh, sorry. I thought you were talking about something else. Um, if you don't set a goal at least a certain amount high, people think you're running a scam. Yep. So, like if you said, "I'm going to go make this MOA a MOA for $50," people would be like, "Yeah, that's You have to set it high enough that people could be like, "Oh, maybe they could make a MOA for $25,000." Right. Like, you can't, right? Right. But like that's listed there. I thought I thought it was like why do you allow a $1 pledge? And the reason for that is it's basically a bookmark. A lot of people will bookmark a campaign by pledging a dollar. So every almost everybody puts a a$1 or $2 level or something because then they get all of the emails about every stretch goal you hit and everything else. And it kind of it Kickstarter will then let you adjust your pledge at any time. So, you can pledge for a dollar and once you see it's doing well, come back and adjust that up to like $22 for your calendar. Yeah. Okay. So, let's Yes. Moving on.

Anyway, no, no, these are all good diversions that we need to establish as we're looking at these numbers, right? Okay. So, we've got about 60 games that made a million dollars or more. We've got a healthy chunk of games in this middle range, right? Banner Saga 3. Now, we'll get to why this isn't enough money here in a second. Um, but let me say a thing here. looking at banner saga. Yeah. So, Kickstarters, the biggest thing about Kickstarters, this will surprise nobody, is that to have a successful Kickstarter, you have to have a lot of people come by, look at what you've put up, and say, "Oh, that's cool. I would like to give some money to get the thing that they would like to do." Notice that first part. You have to have a lot of people come by. What this means is that you either need something with reach like, "Hey, we're a history YouTube channel. We're doing a history calendar. We could put out a couple YouTube videos and shorts saying we're doing a history calendar." And use that

to direct people over to the Kickstarter to come pledge on the history calendar, right? Or maybe you're like Banner Saga 1 and two and you're like, "Hey, we've done this before. people will recognize our name and for everybody who's bought our name or who's on a mailing list, we can send out we're doing another banner saga and get them to come by. Like if Slay the Spire 2 had decided they needed to do a Kickstarter, they don't. They're a tiny dev team who's, you know, been able to take five years to work on their next version. Slay the Spire 2. Slay the Spire is a popular enough brand and is followed by enough people that if they'd said, "We're doing a Slay the Spire 2 Kickstarter," they would have funded well. But again, these are the rare or they're coming in with an existing thing. Yes. Look, you know what Slay the Spire was? How would you like it if there was another one, right? And we have a great example of this, right? We

have an absolutely great example of this because one of my favorite examples of a game that didn't fund particularly well still turned out okay is your favorite Metroid Vadia and mine Hollow Knight which made adjusted to US dollars because this isn't Australian dollars because remember Team Cherry is Australian $36,000 US right dollar sign I'm working on it I'm working on it my hands don't go to that part of the keyboard often and that was a 2014 uh Kickstarter, right? And that was that's relevant, right? Because nobody knew who Team Cherry was in 2014, right? Nobody they made and it's it's a decent number of backers, but nobody knew who they were, right? And now if Silkong was a Kickst if they were like, "Hey, we're having a Kickstarter. Silkong will launch when we reach a million dollars in pre-orders for Silkong." Silkong would come out tomorrow. Mhm. Right. If Wow. That would be such an amazing Kickstarter, right?

When we hit the game is done. Buy it here. Will not release until Yeah. Or at the end of the Kickstarter, 30 days, but you can buy time. You can buy it early to have it come out earlier. Yeah. It would reach a million dollars in the first hour. Yeah. Right. And I'm going to throw a comment from Grass up here. Yeah. For being an industry defining game that is cheap. So, I guarantee like Grass is being a little snarky there because it costs more than $36,000 to make that game, right? And it's just that's how much the devs raised on Kickstarter to help fund the project. And I say help, right? Well, the these uh if I recall correctly, the Team Cherry crew was hobbyists, right? So for hobbyists who are doing this as a thing in their spare time, right, this might be enough to fund the development packages and the computers and the

upgrades and the licensing and the, you know, a little bit of time off and maybe some uh travel to PAX a couple times to show off their game in the indie alley, commission uh music, beautiful, beautiful, amazing music that helps make their game stand out more, right? and so on. In those cases, more of the crowdfunding is going directly to the stuff you need because in those hobbyist cases, you're not paying the people a salary right away because it's like two dudes in a garage. Yeah. Um, yeah. Me deciding to go make a game in my spare time. Yes. Doesn't need to go raise money in the same way because I'm extra credit studio director. my day job is that my evening passion project might be fiddling with a game over three years. That's a very different case than, hey, we're going to go make Crowfall, which is going to be the next badass PVP MMO and we need to go crowdfunded, right? Uh which and we're going to have a whole team in Austin making it. Yeah. Um

Profile actually brings up another thing which is very interesting, right? So, lots of these games, Hollow Knight, Shovel Knight, Blasphemous, Banner Saga, Mighty Number Nine, Bloodstained, kind of Solar Punk. Solar Punk has multiplayer elements are all single or closed system multiplayer games. Mhm. Ashes of Creation is not. Ash of Creation is an MMO. So is Crowfall. There are a lot of games. MMOs, I think in particular, it is easier to demonstrate this with the amount of time, energy, resources, everything that it takes to develop an MMO. I think we all know is far greater than singleplayer play once 40hour Metroid vania that you play through and love dearly, right? But it's not nearly as big a game with as big a scope as an MMO, which makes it really interesting to me that Ashes of Creation only raised 3.27 27 million on crowdfunding, right?

We'll talk more about like what the actual cost is, but yeah, something like a Stardew Valley is a lower overall dev cost than an MMO, which is why the continued trend of MMOs getting kickarted over and over again only to maybe launch into a beta and then fizzle out or maybe launch all of the way and then go dark or whatever is particularly interesting to me. Um, if I remember right, Ashes of Creation is also secretly the secret passion project of some billionaire. Yeah, that's correct. Ash of Creation is also its own unique thing that's captured the hearts and minds of much of Twitch and Yeah. Um, okay. That's its own whole right story. Well, I might be getting it mixed up with it anyway. But yeah, so like funding wise, right? These are coming in with a name. Coming in with something like it's easier for Slay Inspire 2 than you know Bob's first time studio. Yep.

Because we have this increasingly sophisticated audience. You need to bring people in to fund it. Um and people don't fund concepts right anymore. So let's get to the let's get to the to the the second part of this. So we have here a suite of examples which we can come back to of how much games raised. Jeff How much does it actually cost to make a video game? It's like 10 bucks, right? I buy it for like, you know, 20 and like half of that's profit. Let's pick a mid. Is there a What is a game that has decent development size team on there? Like, how many people do you think were on Banner Saga full-time? Uh, let's find out what the size of the current Banner Saga studio is. So, that's Stoic Studio. Okay. Um, they've just made those and I don't know that they have their Oh, they're also making Towerorn right now, which is coming out.

Um, I don't know that Stoic publishes team size. Scroll scroll up. Let me look for solar punk. I should have gotten this ahead of time. I do apologize. Let's do this. Ashes of Creation. Okay. Yeah, sure. I would bet that Ashes of Creation has at least 50 full-time people on it as an MMO. Sure. I think I have I have some numbers. I pegged at 50. So, and we can go up or down. Actually, let's talk about this for a moment. A small team. So, there's like there's like twoerson indie team. We're not going to talk about two person indie team for a moment, but we're going to talk about a small development studio probably has 10 to 20 developers working on a game. A midsize studio for a single game, the let's call it like an A

quality game is probably like 50 people. Okay. AAA game is probably like 200 people. Yeah. And if we're getting to an S tier game like the next Grand Theft Auto, the next Grand Theft Auto probably has a thousand person development team. That sounds correct. So for I was will going to write down how much each um position costs by seniority and then I realized I was just going to have to have you type out a spreadsheet. So we're going to shorthand here. Sure. So for the moment we're going to make a caveat. All of these prices are listed in North America for the North American region meaning it's getting developed in US, Canada or Mexico with the majority being US and Canada because Mexico doesn't have a robust game development scene. Prices will be different for development in Europe and in Asia and in South America because there's different cost of living and there's different payments. So, for

the moment, we're just going to do US or North American dollars. Mhm. It's actually lower because we're averaging Canada, and US costs more than Canada, but I wanted NA. So, this is caveed to Western development for the moment or NA, but like Europe is going to be kind of similar. Yep. And again, this is going to be average numbers. So, the survey I found, Will, listed five levels of people. Sure. So, we're going to have junior and this is and we're going to average these across all of the disciplines. Junior, midle, senior, um, lead slashmanager and principal. So one of the things that a lot of slight tangent you will find plenty of people in

development who are really good at say being an engine programmer or a virtuoso animator or something who also would be very very bad as a manager or team lead. And so the first time I heard about this was Microsoft. I'm sure it started before that. They put a new track in because like when I was a designer starting out you in junior mid-level senior designer lead and when you hit lead you had to start managing people and what this didn't do was leave room for people who were very good at something but were very poor at managing andor scheduling and planning. Didn't want to spend half of their time doing something other than their corp. And so there became a separate track of principle which is basically you are really good at what you do but you will never manage people. It's the I'm really good at what I do you have picked. Yeah. It's the I'm really good at what we do what I do. Leave me alone in my corner

office. You manage the team and come I will bring you a work of art. Great. Cool. Awesome. I I remember actually and this is carried on like one of my best researchers when I was running my research studio. I'm like I was chatting with them. I'm like hey are you interested in becoming a research manager? And they're like, "Oh, God, no." You know, for the love of God, never make me manage or deal with other people. I really like what I do. Yes. Yeah. And and so that is why this position is also lit. And often principles will get paid more than a manager. Like a really expert engineer is incredibly valuable. Yeah. Uh okay, cool. So let's let's look at So let's see. So Will, if you could let's go to Junior. Can you tab to a couple where the money amounts will all line up or does this program not do that? Uh I could have done that in advance if I thought about it but no. Uh okay I mean a junior averaged across design art. Actually if you want to put the four disciplines above that we're listing actually it doesn't really

matter but it's going to be design art programming and production. Production would be like managers and project managers and producers all of that. So, a junior level averaged across all four of those disciplines earns about 45K a year. Uh mid level uh earns about 60. A senior earns about 100 and uh a leader manager also earns about 100 and a principal is about 145. And again, this may seem high or low. Like artists get paid less than programmers. Designers are in the middle. So like again, this is averaged across all four disciplines, right? Right now. So this is a per year cost. I did a little bit of research to see if it was still right. Usually what happens is you take a person's salary

and you multiply it by 1.33 to get roughly a what we should be what they cost cost. This will cover health care. This will cover offices, computers, software licenses, all of that other stuff that goes around. Yeah. Things. Yeah. And yes, this does seem fairly low. Um, but again, remember, we're averaging in artists and other things, too. And we're averaging across the entirety of North America. Yeah. So, this there are game engineers really good in the Midwest who get paid way less than if they were in San Francisco because the cost of living in the Midwest is significantly less than living in San Francisco and they're willing to take that. Yep. And so, um, we'll do a final multiplier for that 1.33 at the end. Will Sure. So, if for the moment we were going to put together a 50 person team, let's say that we're going to go

with um five juniors. You could put like a bracket five. Yeah, there you go. Times five. 25 mid levels because the mid-levels are the people who are actually doing the brunt of the work. Okay. 12 seniors. Okay, five leads/managers and three principles. And this in my mind is a fairly like we may be skewing slightly more senior like they might have more juniors depending on the project, but this is I think a fairly decent one. And one of the other reasons is there's a lot of longevity in the game industry. I regularly meet people who've been in you know 10 to 20 years. So we get a lot of seniors. Yeah. Right. And and you want nobody wants 25. There you go. Yeah. Nobody wants the game that got made by a bunch like nobody wants to publish or crowdfund

probably the game that a bunch of people put together was their very first project without some assurance that it's going to be amazing at the end. Right? One of the things that mid-levels and teen or that seniors leads and principles do is they add name recognition. Right? Like, okay, Richard, this is like slightly Garfield, right? Uh, has added his name to so many card games which are instantly instantly seen as more legitimate because well, Richard Garfield's working on it must be good, right? And there are that that does apply to seniority elsewhere, right? Yeah. Junior would basically be new grad. Okay. So, somebody coming in for their first couple years. Yep. And again, we might be overindexing a little bit. I'm throwing out. So, let's see. Midle, uh, that'd be uh 1.5 million will. Okay. Uh, yep. We're just going to we're we're going to we're going to do some some shorthand here even though it won't add. Um, senior senior would be 1.2 million. Yep. That one I can do in my head. Uh,

uh, leads is 500,000. that one I can and principles is 435. Uh, yep. Why can I not type today? I'm sorry, chat. I'm sorry. I just We're looking just at this. Our cost just from employees in a game studio with nothing else added in is going to be 3.86 million. And is that with or without the 1.3? That's without the 1.3. If you add the 1.3, it goes to a little bit over 5 million. And I have people in chat saying that they think by 1.3 is low. Sure. And again, we're making a very uh if Okay, this is back of the napkin, right? And and I think that just makes the point

about this even stronger, right? that if we're making incredibly lowball conservative estimates for what this might be able to do according to a survey of like if everyone lives in Idaho, right? If you have a game studio in the middle of a corn field that's turned barren in Idaho that nobody wants, you might be able to get it done for this, right? And if the real cost is higher, that just goes further to the point, right? Yeah. So if so, we could for really quick math say 5 million. So, let's say, will that we have a game that's going to take two years to make, which is a pretty quick turnaround. Two years would be $10 million. And that's without without uh the uh the expected cost of living increases, Christmas bonuses, etc., etc., etc., for two years. Right. That's this is also without marketing. Yeah. Or any sort of publicity. And this is without possible

contract positions like I'm going to go hire a music, you know, producer. I'm going to go do some motion capture. I'm going to go do other things. So, hey, Will, can we scroll back up a minute? Yep. Absolutely. To Okay. Two years, $10 million. So, Ashes of Creation, which was crowdfunded in 2017 and is still in production, 17, assuming they started then, which they didn't, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. So, they've been going for 9 years. So assuming they have a 50 person team, that means that they are $45 million in at a very very conservative guess. Bloodstained. When did Bloodstained come out? Do we know when it was released? Uh I have that somewhere. I actually looked

it up. I think it came out in 2017. I believe Bloodstained is was a two-year. Okay. Um let me check. back. Bloodstained Ritual of the Night came out in No, I was wrong. I was wrong. June 18th, 2019. Okay. So, let's say it was a four-year project. Yeah. Was Blood Stain How I actually don't remember looking at Bloodstain. How like is Bloodstain a medium team game? A small team game? Medium. Uh it's it's also a cost that's not factored into any of the math that we've shown so far. localization that's not included in this cost. That might be a publisher cost, right? But it might not other thing to keep in mind. Um it's like a mediumiz blood stained was if Bloodstain was a 50 person team working for four years, that means that it was a $20 million development cost minimum, right? and they were the second highest

ever funding on Kickstarter, raising 25% of that, right? And we're we're going to get to a minute why you should still Kickstarter games, but this is just talking about like the de the highest cost of all game development is the people. Yes. Like actually, Will, you want an interesting one? Mhm. For a minute. Okay. Let's say Grand Theft Auto 6 really is a thousand people. Sure. Okay. Okay. So, let's see. Every 50 people um is actually it's $5 million a year for 50 people, right? So, let's see. 20 more people. 20 times as many people is Yep. 20 times as many people. So, what we're looking at, let's see, 5 million $100 million a year, right? Conservatively. Yeah. And I know for a fact that they have offices in New York and San

Diego, which are not the cheapest places. So, let's see. We're looking at a minimum of a h 100,000 a year, and it's been in development for at least seven years. So, we're looking at $700 million. So, already worth of just people development costs. Yeah. Yeah. And I think I think Dog's totally right. Right. the billion dollar estimate total cost for GTA 6 not far off. Not far off at all. Not at all. Seems entirely reasonable. But I think a lot of people don't go into this breakdown, right? Because one of the big problems uh specifically with video games is that consumers conflate the price they pay Bloodstain is a $10 game on Steam with the amount of money it actually costs to make that thing, right? Even for the indie space, right? Let's let's say that Blood Same was only 25 people, right? Which is possible. It's like a smaller team, right? That's still 2.5 mil a year, right? That's still uh 10

million over the course of a four-year development cycle. That's still half of what they totally in total needed, right? And if you guys remember um three or four weeks ago, we did a one where Will and I went through the Unity store. Yeah. Because I'm I'm starting to put together a game just on the side for fun. And we're talking about allocart development where I'm like, "Wow, look. Will for 40 marked down to 20 because it's on sale right now. I can buy a system that does handles all my saves. I don't have to program that and it will save it to all the different cloud sources. Oh, look, you know, here's one that lets me do a front-end integration and I can pay 60 bucks for it." When you're starting to look at some of these costs here, you can see why I was getting excited. It might take me a month to write a save system. I can pay 20 bucks. If you start thinking people are the highest cost of game development, you start seeing like or even game engines. Look, we don't have to spend, you know, 2 years with 40

programmers building our own game engine. We can just go use Unity. Oh, Unity is going to charge us a little bit. That is still or Unreal will. That is still infantestimally less of a development risk than going to try and build that all yourself because of the cost of people. Yeah, absolutely. So, and so yeah, just like looking at this here, you can see this is why you can't actually fund a game. Excuse me. This is why you can't fund 99% of the games. There's always the 1% that will be an exception, right? And those are usually tiny tiny teams, right? That's that is that would be kickstarting Silk Song, right? That would be Slayer 2. Two people were going to work on that again and they went and raised $250,000. Actually, that still might not cause for five years of development cost for correct, but they also Well, okay. So, and this is where it gets interesting, right?

Because it would amplify their war chest, right? which is one of the other big advantages that the returning studios have that new studios don't because returning studios get to have the profits get to live off of the profits from the last game, right? And Team Cherry doesn't actually need to make Silk Song for money reasons. They don't. Team Cherry really doesn't. We've done the math. Team Cherry doesn't need to make a game again, just like Local Funk doesn't need to make a game again, right? Like they just probably will, but they will because they love doing this and that's great. I I believe personally that we're going to get a much better product because they're not being rushed because of costs, right? Um so because of that, the amount that they kickstart is less relevant, right? But uh and someone did bring this up earlier that like in the case of Ashes like other they they have other funding sources and that's true, right? But the point is that there's this indust there's this consumer assumption that we're trying to to stick

a stick a pin in and pop like a balloon here that the crowdfunding that you're doing for a game is what's paying for the game. Yeah. And it's not right. It's pretty demonstrabably not just on the basis of how much it costs to pay people to do these things to do basically to hire them to do their job which is creating the game. Yep. And as a quick note, most game stores take 30% of the cost of a game. Your publisher takes a certain amount as well. So even if you go sell $5 million worth of your game, your studio is probably only getting half of that. Yep. 2.5 million. Just putting that out there with these other Yeah. things as well. But so having said all of this will right there are still a lot of good reasons to go to Kickstarter or to crowdfund a game.

Yeah. Can we and they are not the actual fund funding part. Sorry. What can we take the math out? Um do we need it? Your call. I I don't I think we're I think we're done with the with the math. Let's scroll down one more. Actually, never mind. Yeah. Um okay. So look, we're so close to each other now, right? I know it's weird. We're big. Um so go on. You get on your side. get on your side. Wait. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm on my side of the room. Um, so you were talking about there are still plenty of good reasons to do a crowdfunding campaign, but the money that you make from the crowdfunding campaign isn't the primary one because you know going in that it's an all but mathematical certainty that you will need to find more money somewhere else, right? Yes. And again, this is very video game specific. We will get to other things later. Yeah. But specifically for games, because it costs so much to make them and because before you can show off your game and get people to get excited about

it, you need to have done a lot of the work, it's a weird matchup. Yep. But one of the industry terms that I absolutely love, this is not a Kickstarter industry, this is a gamedev behind thescenes one, is we call it kick finisher. Yeah. It is not where you go to start a game. It is where you go to finish your game. This is, hey, 80% of our game is done. We really could use a little more money to take what, you know, our publisher gave us this much to go make the game. Wouldn't an, you know, an extra 500,000 or million or even couple million more, let us make x more amount of game? Or if you're not with a big publisher, maybe that's your marketing spend for the game's release. Right. Good point. Yeah. Tons where we take this money that we raised and use it to market it to go sell more copies of the game. Yeah. But like number one, absolute most common thing for a game is

let's try and get some money in early to offset risk. Because you could have just put the game up for pre-sale on Steam. That's not nearly as exciting, right, for a lot of people as coming in, looking at this almost finished game, and saying, "I could help fund this thing to get it across the line, and I'm going to get a discounted copy or a pre-release price of the game." I mean, at the end of the day, kicks kick finisher is roughly let's pre-sell our game with some extra excitement and wrapping. And and the it should be noted at this point that the psychology built directly into Kickstarter is very effective at that, right? Pre-ordering a game on Steam is I put click I click, right? But in a Kickstarter, right, or any crowdfunding campaign, it's I've pledged and my money won't be collected till later. So I need to make sure that the goal gets hit and there are going to be stretch goals and exciting things announced and it becomes an event reveals. Yeah, it's an event.

It is. I would say that in many ways crowdfunding campaigns are the spiritual successor to midnight launches, right? It's that same sort of the game is coming. There's going to be a thing. There's an excitement. There's an atmosphere. There is a reason to be emotionally invested in that event around making a purchase, right? And what you're hoping is that all of that turns into buzz and news, which I just thrown um Odin here's message up on stream. It's also added marketing. Yeah. Like the buzz that you're hoping to get off of this is people post, hey, I just, you know, on Blue Sky or Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Look, I just helped fund you know what are you greening at? I like this one. It's marketing that you make the customer pay you for. Yep. Correct. That's very correct because what you're talking about is very true, right? The I became the ex the backer, right, thing, those posts that it's now

so easy to make. Oh, yeah. Very much on purpose. But I mean that is there are games that do not have a marketing plan that basically use Kickstarter as a marketing plan andor then use the funds raised off of that to continue their marketing and promotional efforts. Yeah. And part of that pre-sale that I wanted to bring up here, particularly for those live service games, particularly MMOs, is what I'm the process I'm going to call finding your true believers, right? So, you probably have some idea of people that you know about, right, who are very interested in your game. The people who are going to be your first GMs, community moderators, whatever. you probably have some idea because they've been involved in some way towards the finishing process either through you know QA or through your socials or whatever but there is a percentage of your like the true believers the people who are like crowall evangel they're evangelical correct crowall is going to

become my whole personality I am all in on crowall crowall is everything I want out of an MMO and it's going to be where I spend all of my time in those people are in some ways is attracted to the idea of I want to get in on the ground floor with a new project to be one of the first people and they're willing to pay money to get in on the ground floor sometimes with a swanky title, a special castle, a unique mount, a whatever, right, to do that. And so that's a process because those people are um very important to keeping the community of particularly of a live service game stable and to be the that evangelical force and they're often their lifetime spend is often much higher. Um, oh yeah, if they're willing to if they're willing to pony up, puny intended, for a custom horse mount in the Kickstarter, they're probably going to be one of the people who's in for cosmetics and future expansions and DLC's and and they're the

ones who will actually buy the horse armor. Yeah. Yeah. They're the ones who will buy the horse armor, right? And if that that is a thing that you do need to consider for a live service game particularly less far less so with a single player game, but you still need the people who are like, "Oh my gosh, Hollow Knight's going to be my whole personality." By the way, well, I What game was it? Um, there was just one that came out that the horse armor actually added classes and professions to your animal. It was actual bard. Oh boy. All right. And we're gonna keep moving. Um but um so yeah, Kick Finisher pre-sales. One of the interesting things about publicity, by the way, that often bites a whole bunch of people running Kickstarter campaigns. At the very beginning of Kickstarter, many media outlets thought that was interesting. I have been told by multiple journalists at this point that Kickstarter is no longer a story. Yep. Running a Kickstarter is not a news story. There are there can be a story

around a Kickstarter, but there are so many Kickstarters and crowdfunds that happen now that no game journalist is going to be like and today here are the 43 Kickstarters that all you know while I was doing research I looked uh and 2024 at the end of 2024 Kickstarter released a report. 2024 was the biggest year ever for Kickstarter. bunch of tabletop stats that I didn't take a close look at, but the number that stuck out to me was that there were 441 successful video game Kickstarters. So, even successful. Yes, successful. Right. So, more than one a day, right? Successful more than one a day. So, we're not going to talk about all the ones that didn't succeed, right? And that's which is a significantly higher number. Correct. So, there's just too many of them in Yeah. And it's just it's not something that their readers want to read about. Yeah. Like if there's an interesting story around there like Richard Garfield comes out of retirement to kick, you know, to make one last game and is kickstarting now. Like that's a

story, right? That is an actual something that people will write about. Kickstarter is an and right. It's Yeah. And and they happen to be Kickstartering it right now. Exactly. Yeah. The the real story is Richard Garfield's last game, not the Kickstarter. Yeah. And Yeah. So that's why a lot of people who run Kickstarters do try and find a story around it because they're actually hoping to get news coverage. Yep. And one final one which is actually surprisingly common but that is never talked about is that Kickstarters and crowdfunding are used as a validation of a concept. I have a friend who sometime in the last couple years ran a successful game Kickstarter because their studio had basically run out of money and publishers were hesitant to invest in it. So they ran a Kickstarter as a hailmary to basically say, "Look, publisher, look at all these people willing to pony up money for this game and how far it is right now. we're going

to take that money and the money you give us because you've seen how much interest there is in it and use it to finish the game. So, it's basically being able to go to a Kickstarter or to a publisher and say there is enough interest that you should fund the rest of this. The people have spoken and they have voted with their dollars which is the best kind of speaking. You have seen people will buy this, but that is a surprisingly common game thing is to use the success of a Kickstarter to then actually go get a publisher to fund the rest of their game. Yep. So, in all of this, right, as we talk about video games, one of the things that's come up in chat repeatedly and in the conversation we had the Discord earlier, and it's it's a very relevant, very salient point, um, 100% to this leverage and negotiations. uh is is that um but board games board games kickstart all the time. Will will board games board games, RPGs, card games, right? So So let's talk about

physical games and why this particular suite of problems doesn't super apply to them and why it's almost entirely flipped, right? Um Kickstarter is ideal for board games. In fact, there are so many uh tabletop gaming is the number one category on Kickstarter. It has been I think forever. It's pretty close to forever if it hasn't actually been forever. Um just because uh it is so well suited to that because So will can I talk about a thing? Yeah, absolutely. Can we look one quick more time at the big series of numbers just to make you just to make Yes. Absolutely. Small maybe small. Okay, here we go. Okay, great. Okay, let's scroll down to the cost for a second. Midsize team, 50 people, 5 million a year, two years for a game, $10 million needed because this took 50

people, two years to do. Cool. Okay, well, that's what I just wanted to look at again to bring that back in. Okay, we're going to go design will a nice board game. Hectomancer the board game. Sure. We're going to have a designer work on it for a couple of months. We're gonna have a couple months worth of art time and a couple months worth of graphic artist time. Okay, cool. We've added one year basically 3 months, three months, three months, three months of developer time total in there. Some more, some less. Some people will do this for 3 or 4 years, but like you're just seeing the difference right here for a moment. You know, this is less than a year for a small number of people. So, the development cost upfront for a video game, you know, we are looking at that $5 million plus a year where for a board

game might be h 100,000. Yep. But you look at the other end, delivery video game. Once it's done, they can put it up on Steam and the Xbox store and PlayStation and iOS. Digital delivery. Whether they sell a 100 copies of their game or a million does not cost them anymore. Once the game is made, digital product is equivalently free to give out to people. Board games are the exact opposite. So small development team cost versus large for video games. video games zero cost basically for distribution. Board game super high cost because they then have to go print the board and the cards and the standies and maybe the dice and they have to and the box and the rules. They have to pack it all in together and they have to get it shipped out. Yep. All of that is significantly more expensive. So, if you're looking at Kickstarter of can I raise a nominal amount of can I go raise

$250,000 for this awesome looking board game. Well, if it only cost you a h 100,000 to develop, awesome. You've marked up your kit, you know, you then go print all the physical merch and you've priced it out. That is a good successful model for running and you're not having to tell some it is the actual funding part. Yeah. Crowdfunding. Yeah. it that is a case where you can say each copy like because most of the time they'll already they have to have the the printer in mind they have to have in a lot of cases prototypes in mind to show them off right so they know what the unit cost is and they'll usually tell you what the unit cost is right this is how much the standies cost this is how much the minis cost and this and that and the other one of the reasons that minis are so popular is that minis um once you hit the break point where the molds are paid for the cost to the cost ratio gets much better for minis because people are willing to pay a lot

for high quality minis and once you've paid for the molds that are making the minis then it's a lot of profit as an example right the big one too about things like board games and RPGs and other things is you can use Kickstarter to help refine and hone your marketing pitch and you can then take that into yourself you know when Eddie went and made Pugmire Eddie was on last you know, he wasn't able to sell that for years and years after doing his Kickstarter and then he went and did a Pugm 2 Kickstarter and is continuing to sell that. It's a good fun game. Our friends over at Hit Point Press with Humblewood are just finishing up their Kickstarter for Humblewood 2. you know, be just because they finished the Kickstarter, you know, that's their validation of the concept, chance to, you know, see what sticks with people and then use that to not just fund that, but then to fund the development of or the production of all of the rest of it. And one of the big things we learned in with physical merch is the more of a thing you print, the lower it costs to

make each individual unit. Yeah. If I want to print 500 of these calendars, it's going to cost me X. If I want to print 2,000 of them, each one is going to cost onethird X to print it. So, if I can get basically do a whole bunch of calendars, I make more profit on a per calendar basis. If I'm going to go sell Pugmire or Humblewood, if I can sell a thousand books, I make a lot more profit than if I can only sell a hundred books on a per book basis. And because of that, it should be noted that one of the ways you can roll forward board game Kickstarter profits in a way that you can't with tabletop or with digital games is you can just increase the size of the print run. Yep. So, like if your profit margin is X, instead of taking X as profit, you can just say, "All right, increase the size of all of the print runs and now I have stock to ship to game stores and that's covered, which means that all the money come back in." We had 2,000

Kickstarters, you know, people saying it, so we're going to instead of ordering 4,000 copies out of our book, we're now going to order 6,000. All of our costs drop. Yeah. And we have more inventory to sell. Yeah. though of course um as Grass is right you don't want to print too much because then you got a warehouse full of things you can't sell. Very true. Like there is a balancing act here. Yeah. But one of the weird things about physical is the more you can order at one time the cheaper it is and therefore the more profit you make on a per sale basis. And digital it is ideally suited to Kickstarter because you get to see how many copies you need before you order anything. Yeah. And all of those are huge benefits to physical goods which digital doesn't really share because the distri the development cost is so high that the per unit profit margin doesn't exist until you finish the perunit profit margin doesn't drop. If I sell a 100,000 or a million I don't make more money on a per unit

basis going between the two of those. Yeah, correct. So yeah, that's that's our our thoughts on why you can't kickstart video games or crowdfund video games. Uh you you should support ones that are out and look fun. Yeah. But you're not actually funding the So the TLDDR, you're not actually funding it, right? You're maybe funding a portion of it, right? But you are never ever ever excuse me. 1% of the time you're you're covering the funding of it, but you are not actually covering the funding of most games. though you very much are helping them complete right and get you the game. And I think that that mind shift is really important for us as educated consumers to have, right? As we were talking about before, the consumer base that um frequents Kickstarter, right, that frequent other places like um Backer Kit, right, is a more sophisticated audience and they've become more and more sophisticated on the tabletop side. there is still some amount of people being shocked that they

didn't get a whole video game made for $50,000 US. Um, and so we thought it would be cool to to sort of debunk that and to to take a look at Kickstarters. Um, yeah. Yeah. Uh, an important note for all of you here on stream and, uh, off in Nebuland. There will be no stream next week as Jeff is away uh, at PAX East. If you're going to be at PAX East, uh I believe we have a panel on we're Oh, Friday. We are doing a panel Friday afternoon talking about Minecraft and Until Dawn. Basically, the last two big video game movie adaptations because they each took wildly different swings at how they did their um adaptation. And we have a couple of game people on, we have a couple of movie people on. So, it's going to be it's going to be a good panel. Yeah, that that's going to be stop by and see us. Yeah, it's going to be an excellent time. Uh, thank you all so very much for joining. If you uh want to talk about a Kickstarter that you backed and were

really happy with or unhappy with or talk about Kickstarter or your experiences with it in general, do it in the comments. It is up on Blue Sky. Uh, and we will see you all not next week but the week after. So, that is the which will will be streaming. I will be Yeah, not this there will not be a design club next week. Correct. Uh we'll be back on the 15th with our next design club and uh we'll let you know what it's going to be in a couple days in advance. So uh until next time everybody take care of yourselves, take care of each other. Uh and we'll see you all then. Say bye to the people, Jeff. Bye to the people, Jeff. [Music] But we didn't actually stop the stream, just the recording. Yeah, cool. I thought that went pretty well. I like that's what I've been wanting to talk about for a while. So, that was fun. Yeah, it was a good conversation. And thank you to everybody in chat for the for the examples and for the comments. That was really helpful. And even if we

didn't pull your comments up on stream, uh we're reading them and they're helping guide the discussion. Um so, thank you all all very much for that. was very uh useful. Yeah. Uh I'm still uh I personally, by the way, I'll give you I'll give you mine. I'm still sad about Crowsworn. Um I did at one point back uh Star Citizen for like the $20 level, 20 bucks. Um and I'm still a little bummed about that. But uh those two I I also got burned a bunch on minis. Um but those are my At this point, a lot of people have I've been burned on X from Kickstarter. The most interesting one. The most interesting one. My the weirdest Kickstarter update I've ever gotten. Here you all get this one for freezes. Um I got we got a message that the project would be un incomplete and we would not be able to receive our funds back because the the lead on the project whose brainchild this this whole project was had been arrested and uh convicted for murder uh

and would be going to jail. And so we would not be receiving the the the open- source laser tag system that we had uh backed. Um and I was like, you know, that's fair, but like what a Kickstarter message, right? That's that's the weirdest one. Um well, can you keep going for 30 seconds? I'll be right back. Yeah, absolutely. Uh yeah. Yeah. Did they kill someone with the laser? No. No, they didn't kill someone with the laser. I was really bummed too because they had a they had a mesh network open networking idea for like ad hoc laser tag like arena setups which was really cool and interesting to me. Um but yeah that's yes that is in fact how that one ended. Odinir yeah it looked really cool. It's a great idea. The the concept is very sound right. You use instead of having base stations or instead of having the the arena monitor everything, you use a mesh network between all of the systems and then if

the if two mesh networks get out of touch with each other, you have a method to reconcile when they come back in touch. It's kind of cool. It's kind of nifty. Really great. Yeah. Um so, uh yeah. Um chat again, thank you. I really enjoyed this one. Uh uh I need to make a thumbnail. I completely forgot yesterday. That's okay. Uh we'll we'll do that. So um I think what should we actually quick um comments? What do you think sell this? Like if you were going to see a thumbnail, do I need a big Kickstarter logo with a slash through it? Um do we have a bean asking for money? We have Zoe busking somewhere, I think. Right. What if we replaced the head of that with Kickstarter? This is why you can't kickstart video games and it's Kickstarter busking or crowdfund. We're specifically calling it crowdfunding because I I uh

full disclosure, I think that crowdfunding is a more apt um description of the problem, right? Because Kickstarter, there's a reason to do a Kickstarter for a game and it's often pretty good, right? We talked about it. true believers and proof of concept and pre-sales and all of that, but you're not actually crowdfunding it then. Um, so, um, yeah, you can get rid of our networks and stuff like Ziggb's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Did HFL not Okay, there we go. Yeah, like that. Yeah, Brain, just like that. A crowd of sad Zoies, right, sir? Please sir, can I have some funding? No, more just an Oliver Twist reference. Well, look, last week's was a Dickens. We could keep with the Dickens theme. Last week was a Muppets Christmas Carol. This week can be Oliver Twist, right? We'll just go through all the Dickens novice novels. Quick, someone give us a way that we can get a Tale of Two Cities

into a into a thumbnail. Anyway, I have some more. Um, yeah, Kickstarter is just the most well-known brand name way to do it, right? But the the Kickstarter campaign is more than crowdfunding, right? Crowdfunding is the underlying reason and the ultimate deliverable in a like tangible form, right? Is the crowdfunding, but the Kickstarter itself has become so much more than that because of the culture that's arisen around it, right? Um, the money, it's not about the money, it's about sending a message. Maybe it's that. Wait, hold on a sec. Is it the Joker sitting on a giant pile of Kickstarter cash? It's not about It's more of a breakfast thing as you No, that's fair. It's not about the funding. It's about sending a message. Oh, that would be so good. I'm grumpy that I thought of this. A tale of two developers. Yeah. Elite

Dangerous versus Star Citizen. Yeah. Kickstarter is kind of like Q-Tip or Kleenex. Exactly, Hunter. Yes. Uh, it has become the genericized brand name for a thing. I asked actually Will before we started if Kickstarter was Kleenex and he thought about it. Yeah. Like Right. It is. We're just I like drilling down to the idea that crowd also crowdfunding is I feel like invokes the curiosity gap which is the Okay. If I ask a question, if I say is the sky blue in a in a YouTube video title, right? We get, "Well, of course it is. Duh. And of course it's not. Let me grab my tin foil. It was all manufactured as part of choose your conspiracy." Um, right. There's no curiosity gap there. There's no, "Oh, I wonder what they're talking about." Right. Um, so here, you can't crowdfund video games. Oh, what do they mean by that? There's a little bit of a

curiosity gap. Mhm. And that's actually one of our biggest things is we try and get a title thumbnail combination that people look at and say, "Oh, that is worth watching and spending my time on." Yep. Because your time is one of the most valuable resources out there. If we're going to do it, we need to deliver. Correct. Absolutely. Um so yeah, uh chat like like Jeff said, uh there will not be a stream next week. I will be here. I'll be playing more Blueprints. Uh, if you're not familiar with Blueprints, uh, you are the nephew of an eccentric uncle who has a mansion that changes every morning at dawn, and you have to try and discover the 46th room of a 45 room mansion. Good luck. Mhm. And it's a puzzle rogike uh, that I've been enjoying a lot. So, I'll be taking the time when the crew is away at Paxis to do an additional day of blueprints streams. So, please do come join us next week for that. Even though there won't be a design club, we'll be talking about it the whole time. It's relatively leisurely paced, so we don't need to worry too much about

in-your-face action. Um, yeah, it's phenomenal. Uh, Jeff, we can I think we can we'll we'll talk thumbnail. I think this is probably a good place. You can I'm already looking around at like other images and stuff to put on. I'm looking at the the chat and like Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'd put Hornet on, by the way. Who did Who said Hornet? Um, but I did um but I did Hornet in something like 3 months ago when we were talking about Silk Song. Yeah. And and hype, undeliverable hype. Oh, yeah. That was a good title. Yeah. Well, it was very good. Very, very, very happy. Uh, we'll be back tomorrow as well with um more Clare Obscure uh Expedition 33, which is a hell of a ride. Uh, it is it is one of the darkest, weirdest, most topsyturvy turn-based RPGs I've ever played. It's gorgeous. It's amazing. It's heart-wrenching. It's dark. I love

the combat. I love the story. Come follow along. It's going to be great. I think this is a good place to let Janet go. So, Janet, we will see you all Monday for breakfast. There is a breakfast on Monday, so we'll see you all then. Please take care of yourselves and we'll see you all uh next