Kickstarter Campaign Review (Patreon)

Hi, Pixel Family!

Now that the campaign is over, we can make a summary of everything that happened, what worked well and what didn't work, and discuss the channels we will use to communicate from now on.

First, we want to thank every single one of you for your donations and your enthusiasm spreading the word about us. Many may think that reaching just 60k dollars is a failure, since the goal was 90k, but considering we are at early stages of development and we don't have the fame or connections to increase our reach, we have to admit it was a pretty impressive result. Next year, with a fully playable demo, all mechanics described here implemented, and starting with the support of all of you, results will be much better! That makes us very excited about what will come, and we will make our best to exceed all your expectations on the relaunch.

As positives of this campaign, we increased our Twitter followers by ~48%, our Discord server grew ~85%, our support from Patreon increased ~1100% (which will allow us to go full-time despite not reaching the goal on Kickstarter), and we now got our presence known by the media and influencers. Looking strictly to these results, we can see a very bright future for Tears of Magic.

For what we need to improve for next campaign, there are a series of things. First, our promo art, including the splash art and other visual banners, should all be improved to show more of the pixel art and game footage. The general non-pixel art should also be improved, including portraits from characters, and we will work with the community to define the best style for the game.

Another thing that needs to be improved is to show more footage and content and have a demo available on Steam from the first day of relaunch. The idea is to talk less and show more, and to include gifs with game footage to describe the mechanics of Tears of Magic. The trailer should also be improved to show more footage of the game, and earlier on the video. If support from Patreon allows, we will also have the theme song by Yoshino Aoki, which can be used on the trailer, as well as other music for the demo.

We also need to update some of the oldest assets, like sprites for running cycle, adding wind movement to trees and bushes, improve the appearance of water with gerstner waves and possibly fast fourier transforms, among many other small graphical improvements.

Another common complaint was about port to consoles and physical rewards (which were an addon in this campaign). For the next campaign, we will include port to consoles in the main goal and make physical rewards standard for the higher tier pledges. The goal shouldn't be much different from now, because we will reduce how much we need to go full-time (maybe zero depending on support from Patreon at the time) but increase by a similar amount for game ports (includes costs like licenses, devkits and other associated costs).

We hope you are all with us on our Twitter and Discord to see those changes being updated incrementally.

About statistics, we reached 1094 backers and a total of 61917 euros (60712 US dollars), or around 67% of the initial goal. From this total, over 23% came from Kickstarter sources (search, discovery, reminders etc.), 13% from Google, 12% from direct links, 12% from Twitter, 10% from Youtube, and the rest from several other sources. We got only 2% from Facebook and 1% from Reddit, which means we must invest more time gaining visibility in those platforms.

About pledges, the least donations came from the enthusiast tier (10 euros cost, 1% of total) and the avatar tier (500 euros cost, 5% of total), while the most donations came from collector tier (100 euros cost, 24% of total) and player tier (25 euros, 23% of total). This information will be used to adjust tiers for next campaign, probably scrapping completely the enthusiast tier and adding physical rewards starting from avatar tier (limited edition of physical copy).

Finally, backers came mostly from United States (56%), Canada (7%), United Kingdom (6%), Germany (5%), followed by France, Australia, Brazil, Sweden, Spain and Austria. The two cities with more than 10 backers were Seattle (USA) and Melbourne (Australia). This means we have potential to grow in some regions by localizing the next campaign to languages like Portuguese, French, German, Spanish and Japanese.

Anyway, it was a big honor to have all of you here, and we will come back even stronger. We will soon create a new pre-launch page so you can all follow, and we will still use this place for major updates. If you want to see regular minor updates and give direct feedback to the development, please, join us on Discord and follow us on Twitter. Also, make sure to support us on Patreon if you didn't do it yet, as that will allow us to start paying the composers (including Yoshino Aoki), and maybe even hire some extra hands to reduce the load on our artist. See you soon!

Kind regards,

Good Old Pixel Team