The Launch
On Feb. 26, we launched our Kickstarter campaign in the hopes of funding the rest of Spycursion’s development. Our spirits were high (even if our energy levels weren’t), we hit 2% funding within a few hours, but most of all, we were just excited for our studio to move into a new phase of its life. We had lined up PR contacts and were running a really clever — perhaps too clever — marketing campaign. At that point, all we had to do is wait for the inevitable surge in backers.
Early Bird
Admittedly, we should have seen the signs. By Day 3 I was beginning to, but to be completely honest, I spent most of the first three days of our campaign so exhausted from the preparation of it that I could do little else but refresh social media feeds and ask Mauricio why more backers weren’t coming in. The press weren’t responding to us in nearly enough volume, our ad campaign was a total flop, and our mailing list on its own wasn’t large enough to drive the early traffic we needed. We had focused all of our energy on that 72-hour period, and it netted us a whopping 4% funding. I was about to call a pow-wow with Mauricio and Dan to figure out how we could save this floundering campaign. Until…
CRACK!
Did you hear that? That was the sound of my wife breaking her wrist (in a very complicated and interesting fashion, she says). So, yes, I spent much of the next week focusing on her rather than our Kickstarter campaign.
The Doldrums
By the time I got back into things, our campaign hadn’t advanced much further and we all agreed that it was more or less doomed. That’s when we made the decision to move to Patreon and shared this update on the Kickstarter page. Since that update, Mauricio and I have been working on said Patreon page, discussing our new development plans… and looking for jobs. C’est la vie.
The Future!
As you may have already gathered, development on Spycursion will continue! It will be at a slower pace, no doubt. We almost certainly won’t be able to hit the Q4 2020 goal that were aiming for with the Kickstarter campaign. On the upside, if we can get our sustainable funding situation worked out, then you’ll have happier, less stressed-out devs working on the game — which means greater productivity and fewer bugs!
For now, we’ve launched a Patreon page to serve as both a funding boost and a barometer of how our fans are feeling about the game. Right now, our membership tiers are very simple: For every month that you back us, for an amount of your choice (more on that in a minute), you get one month of Spycursion gameplay after it’s released. We will certainly add more tiers, and possibly raise the minimum price tier, as time goes on. For now, we’d just like to know what our supporters want in terms of rewards. Let us know if you have reward ideas or other thoughts on our Patreon page!
In diagnosing the non-success of our Kickstarter campaign, one of the conclusions we reached is that the pricing and value we offered didn’t line up. Our pricing was based on a fuller, more polished version of Spycursion that we had in our heads — rather than reflecting the presentation that we were able to showcase at this stage of development. People don’t see what’s in our heads, they only see what we can show them, and what we could show them didn’t justify the price points. (And yet, it clearly did, for those who backed us. A friend pointed out that some backers were willing to pledge over $200 for a game that’s 18+ months away! That’s certainly not nothing!)
This is why the “pay what you want” model we’ve adopted on Patreon is key. We’d like our supporters to think carefully about what they see, what we’ve shared, and our own capabilities, to decide what a month of Spycursion is worth to them… and then tell us! At this point, we’re expecting a lot of $1/month backers, and that’s perfectly fine. Over time, we hope to earn more supporters and more trust. The nice thing about Patreon is that we don’t have to get everything right at the beginning; our fans can help us over a longer time period in molding Spycursion into what they’d like it to be. We hope you will join us on this journey!