38 – The Kickstarter and the Goal

Some of you are probably wondering why I canceled the Kickstarter at €21,000 when we would have reached €25,000. Realistically, in the final week it likely would have ended somewhere around €27,000–€29,000.

But what’s behind that goal? Technically, it would have been possible to produce a small print run of the game. Sounds good, right? Well… not quite. I could produce 1,500 copies and would have already sold 500 of them. But that would leave almost no buffer for the currently very unstable freight costs. On top of that, the remaining 1,000 copies would still need to be sold — and of course, storing them also costs money. Keep in mind: for a small card game, 1,500 copies fit easily on a single pallet. For a game the size of Magical Friends, it’s more like ten pallets.

Selling the game outside of Kickstarter as a still‑unknown designer is definitely harder and very time‑consuming. If you sell to retailers, the sale price is significantly lower. Typically, you receive about 45% of the net price or 60% of the gross price. With distributors, the price is even lower.

Yes, you could still generate revenue from the remaining games, but so far only the production costs would be covered. I’ve paid all marketing costs myself, and my illustrators should be paid fairly as well. So after selling the games, I might end up with less of a loss than I currently have — but my working time (which continues to increase after the Kickstarter due to production and sales) would not be compensated in the slightest. And let’s not forget: I’ve already put 3,000 hours of work into this game. That’s two years of full‑time work without earning any other income.

Of course, it would be wonderful to have produced and sold my first game — and with a second print run, an expansion, or a second game, greater success would be likely. But then the game should also be produced really well, and with a €25,000 goal, a few features I’d like to include would still be missing.

So why not set a higher goal from the start? The higher the goal, the later it gets reached — and that’s a big problem. It’s even very likely that we would have raised more money overall if I had set the goal at just €20,000. Why? Because once a goal is reached, the project is considered successful — and successful projects attract more backers. Stretch goals, meaning upgrades for the game, can also only be unlocked once the main goal is reached.

So I chose a goal that was as low as possible while still making it technically feasible to produce the game. At the same time, it needed to remain plausible to cancel the Kickstarter if necessary. If I had found a larger distribution partner, I might not have canceled the Kickstarter at all.

In a way, the Kickstarter goal is also a marketing tool — and what didn’t work so well in terms of marketing is something I’ll talk about in the next entry.

What’s your opinion on Kickstarter funding goals? Leave me a comment.

37 – After the Kickstarter is (unfortunately) before the Kickstarter

A few months have passed since the last entry on this blog. A lot has happened, and there’s a lot to talk about. Too much to fit into a single blog post — and then there’s the question of where I should even begin …

The Kickstarter campaign was an emotional roller coaster. After working toward this moment for two years, my nerves were already worn thin. Every small setback felt huge, and every small success felt just as huge.

On top of that, an enormous amount of work goes into a Kickstarter campaign. That’s also why there haven’t been any blog entries in recent months. For 10 weeks straight, I was working 60 hours a week with no weekends off. At some point, I simply couldn’t do more — I had reached the limits of my creativity.

Where does all the time go? You spend it on the essential preparations needed to make the Kickstarter page presentable — designing the page, creating videos, preparing the reviews. And then there were the preparations for, and participation in, conventions during that time, like BerlinCon two weeks before the campaign and SPIEL 2021 right in the middle of it.

Natürlich wurde in jeder freien Minute Werbung gemacht. Postings auf Social-Media-Plattformen wollten hochgeladen, Reviews geplant und angekündigt werden. Man muss sich um bezahlte Werbung auf Facebook und Co kümmern und jede Option nutzen, die man finden kann, um das Spiel zu promoten. Außerdem bekommt man auf einmal viel Aufmerksamkeit von Herstellern, Fullfillment-Services und Publishern. Und dann war da noch die Kampagne selbst. Ich musste immer aktiv sein und möglichst viele Interaktionen setzen.

Ich habe zwar Illustratorinnen, die mich mit den Grafiken und auch auf den Messen unterstützen, ansonsten kümmere ich mich allerdings allein um all diese Dinge. Und auch wenn ich gerne kreativ bin, hat Kreativität auch ihre Grenzen, vor allem wenn so viele dieser Dinge sehr viel davon benötigen. Das war auf jeden Fall sehr erschöpfend.

Auch wenn es sehr schade ist, dass der Kickstarter nicht geklappt hat, die Pause tut jetzt auch mal gut. Dieses Wochenende hatte ich zum ersten Mal seit Langem ein freies Wochenende mit Freunden und Brettspielen ... und jeder Menge Kuchen, und das war hervorragend. :-)

Nun habe ich noch nicht viel über die Kampagne und den Abbruch erzählt, dazu mehr beim nächsten Mal. Es gab viele Erfahrungen, die ich machen durfte, darunter auch einige sehr positive. Magical Friends geht nächstes Jahr auf jeden Fall in die nächste Runde, so viel ist sicher.

Ich werde euch in den nächsten Einträgen viel zu erzählen haben, außerdem möchte ich alte Einträge mit den neuen Erfahrungen ergänzen, das werde ich aber auch immer in den neuen erwähnen.

Welche Fragen zu Kickstarter oder zum Abbruch würden dich denn am meisten interessieren? Schreib uns einfach einen Kommentar und ich werde entweder dort oder in einem eigenen Blog-Eintrag antworten.

Update: Das ist natürlich schon ein alter Blog Eintrag. Das Spiel ist natürlich schon veröffentlicht. Der Eintrag hat aber trotzdem Relevanz, da es eben auch passieren kann das ein Kickstarter abgebrochen wird.