In my own quest to do a Kickstarter I decided that to do it right I needed data so I could make some evidence based decisions on how to go about it.

Over a month of work and I've got two reports I've done after collecting data from 150 RPG related crowdfunding projects from April 2011 to April 2012.

Part One deals with the broader numbers of the survey as a whole.
Part Two looks more closely at what occurred at various funding levels with backers. Along with that I look at key rewards that are offered for the RPG market.

I have a part three in the works, and I'll once I get my spreadsheets cleaned up I'll post the raw data files and then the real statisticians can tear this stuff apart.

I hope it helps people to figure out their own projects and how to get them off the drawing board and into people's hands through crowdsourcing.

Enjoy!

Welcome to TheRPGSite!

That was an informative read; thank you for linking to it. It is interesting to note the differences between the successful and unsuccessful initiatives: there seems to be a large difference in the average number of backers (166 vs. 18), so maybe projects that achieve a critical mass become much easier to generate buzz and draw in more funding (which seems to be confirmed by your "Patterns in Unsuccessful Projects" heading). We can also see over-ambition, and some interesting similarities - e.g. that the average support per backer is effectively identical across successful and failed projects.

Nice how you checked your dataset for outliers; that is some decent work.

That was an impressive first post! Thanks for sharing your work and I am positive that it will be very useful to those of us who want to produce projects in the future.

Welcome to theRPGSite!


-TGA

Thank you! It's nice to see some hard numbers!

-clash

It's interesting to me that there's sort of an eBay effect with funding targets. Lower amounts paradoxically make more money, but it seems to me there's a risk there with shooting low and not getting enough funding.

It's also disappointing to me to see so much of a bias towards established personalities.  As someone planning to embark on his first commercial endeavour, this sort of mutes my hopes some in this area.

And further, I wonder if some of these averages are all that sustainable.  If I'm honest with how much it'll cost to fund this project to the level I need, it seems like I'm torpedoing my chances for success by actually asking for it, which means taking the risk of setting it at a lower amount to cover only my external costs like art and layout, leaving nothing for myself beyond the hope of future sales, which is exactly the kind of risk I saw Kickstarter as helping me to avoid.

Gives me something to think about I suppose, so I appreciate you posting this.

Quote from: J Arcane;532270And further, I wonder if some of these averages are all that sustainable.

I am fairly well convinced they are not. There is a fad element to spending money in an exciting new way; there is also a saturation (or exhaustion?) point after which there may be a consolidation, or simply a race to the bottom, as it happened in some segments of d20 publishing.

Yeah, when I first contemplated doing a kickstarter I was going from the approach of just adding up the entire production cost, including being paid for the work I was putting into it.  A friend who had already been backing RPG kickstarters for awhile cautioned me that such a high goal ($12000) didn't seem like it would work from what he'd observed.

After spending far too much time just randomly looking at crowdfunding projects I figured I needed to do this properly and just get the data and see what it told me.

It pretty strongly showed that, beyond sheer luck, you need to make a name for yourself if you want to ask for a high initial goal.

Two examples of this effect would be:

Tephra - This project initally seems like a bizarre fluke.  No PDF is offered, there is only a single image (which is clean and solid, but nothing earth shattering) and overall nothing leaping out as unusual.  However if you go over to the devs website you find that they have been working on it in earnest for five years and developed quite a social newtwork from cons and playtesting.  So while nothing on the KS page itself tells you they had a name, they did even if it wasn't properly "established."

Another interesting case study is looking at Mythic Hero.  Here you have an established designer with a solid track record and who gives a persuasive pitch on the unique qualities of the project.  He sets his goal very high at $33,000.  Over on RPG.net he detailed in posts the rationale for that goal and essentially it was him laying out the total cost for him to devote several months to the project, along with all of the professional support and production to make a top notch product.  All of that counted for something because while it did not reach funding, it did raise almost $26000, an amount that buries all but four other projects in the survey.  Contrast this with another project with a similar funding goal, M'diro, which did not perform well.  I'd guess that both projects had a similar vision of needing such a high number, but Mythic Hero had the previous work history behind it.

The big thing I'm taking away from it is that as an amateur I'll have to start small and build up a portfolio of projects.  It'll both develop a network and following, but also give proof that I can deliver.  Sweat equity seems unavoidable.  However, I spent 30 years running RPGs and so the act of developing content is nothing new to me, so KS development isn't a radical shift from what I've been doing for decades.  What crowdfunding does do is give that essential springboard to get you over the hurdle.  I've spent a dozen years doing design work with some idea of publishing, but the idea of risking even a few thousand dollars has never fit in with my own living situation, so crowdfunding is a huge boon from my own vantage point.

Quote from: Melan;532284I am fairly well convinced they are not. There is a fad element to spending money in an exciting new way; there is also a saturation (or exhaustion?) point after which there may be a consolidation, or simply a race to the bottom, as it happened in some segments of d20 publishing.

Also when the reality sets in that a large number of projects will be bad, or at the very least mediocre, when they finally do get finished.

I expect this will be less of a problem for tabletoppers, since, on average, our discernment between meh material and truly good material in our own preferred medium is pretty bad.

Quote from: Melan;532284I am fairly well convinced they are not. There is a fad element to spending money in an exciting new way; there is also a saturation (or exhaustion?) point after which there may be a consolidation, or simply a race to the bottom, as it happened in some segments of d20 publishing.

It just seems, from the averages I'm seeing in the first link, that there's a bit of a catch-22 for the project starter.

If I fund my project to the full amount needed, to cover art, layout, writing, editing, and playtest time, then I'm unlikely to succeed, because the average for the successful target is too low.

If however,  I aim low, and only shoot for what I need to pay the people who aren't me, basically just art and layout in this case, then I can make that lower target, but I'm taking the risk that if it doesn't overfund, all my time is essentially unpaid and I can't pay the rent, nor do I have any extra money to spend on promoting the game at things like cons and such, save perhaps through volunteer proxies ( and I've never been comfortable with employing volunteers for profit work).  The result is a less quality project, with less visibility, because I have to keep the project on part-time basis like it is right now.

There's also the cost of backer rewards themselves to consider. My limited experience tells me that bigger backer rewards do draw eyeballs, and the higher brackets are almost always filled for these things, but the trouble with those bigger reward levels is it requires commensurate product in return to justify it beyond simply the charity of the backer, and that means stuff that costs money. If you're not very careful, you wind up spending a lot of that fresh capital just paying for all the copies of books and T-shirts and all that rot for the contributers.

It is disappointing to me that, when it comes down to the numbers, and compared to how Kickstarter is working out in other fields, that Kickstarter is not having the same effect of making the work more supportable.  It was my hope to scrape enough funds together to cut myself a check at $.05 a word, so that I could afford to spend the summer working on it full time and thus have a much better project ready in time for fall.

But from what I'm seeing, even that paltry wage would put me well over average, and risk me simply getting no funding at all.  So while in other fields, Kickstarter seems to have offered creators to actually do this stuff for a living, in the case of RPGs, writing them remains ever a sucker's game and in no way capable of paying the bills.

Quote from: J Arcane;532295There's also the cost of backer rewards themselves to consider. My limited experience tells me that bigger backer rewards do draw eyeballs, and the higher brackets are almost always filled for these things, but the trouble with those bigger reward levels is it requires commensurate product in return to justify it beyond simply the charity of the backer, and that means stuff that costs money. If you're not very careful, you wind up spending a lot of that fresh capital just paying for all the copies of books and T-shirts and all that rot for the contributors.

In part 3 I'll be covering some of this.  Not in a systematic way, because there is only so much time I had for data collection, but as I went I noted down hit or miss patterns I saw with various swag.

Overall my impression is that a lot of the little items that would cost a lot per unit aren't really needed for success.  Instead it's about getting specific rewards that let a backer leave their mark on the product, or have a deluxe item that is reserved only for higher funding levels where you can absorb the cost without it being an issue.

As for other costs... it's a tough one because I think it can really just depend on the individual.  My wife is an English teacher and so she's the defacto proofreader and editor.  Not a professional, but good enough to get the job done.

In terms of layout, I'm comfortable doing it on my own using Scribus, but that's me.  I can see how some people might not have the mind for it.  I'm basically just going to look at some of the top selling books in the hobby and just follow generally what they do with layout.  

Generally I find the RPG market to be a fairly forgiving bunch of people.  The hobby isn't very large and has always had a DIY vibe to it, so I'm not too worried about needing huge sums of money to achieve professional tolerances within the publishing field.  Just keep things simple and the "good enough" effect carries a lot of RPG material forward.  It's when you want your product to look like Paizo books that I suspect a lot of complication and potential grief can occur.

One thing I've already found very valuable is all of the support for publishers over at RPGNow.  They have videos and guides to get you through a lot of technical elements of publishing, pushing the bar down very low.

Quote from: J Arcane;532295But from what I'm seeing, even that paltry wage would put me well over average, and risk me simply getting no funding at all.  So while in other fields, Kickstarter seems to have offered creators to actually do this stuff for a living, in the case of RPGs, writing them remains ever a sucker's game and in no way capable of paying the bills.

It seems this way in other niches too, outside of rpg games.  Finding funding of any sort, seems to always be an issue.

For example, with cuts in government grants over the last decade in some of the sciences, some legitimate scientists have been applying for funding from less reputable sources such as the Templeton Foundation.

I was recently reading the book "How the Hippies Saved Physics", which is the story of some non-mainstream physicists during the 1970's that got some funding for their research work from less reputable sources like the Werner Erhard Foundation.

So even some legitimate scientists will do almost anything to secure funding for their research work.

Tephra offers a core rulebook, in some fashion.

It's at 22,000 dollars, 22 times the goal!

There must be a few people that know more about it than is presented on the kickstarter page.

My only issue is the projects that, on its low levels, offer no version of the finished game for those that offer a particularly low bid. Surely the honourable, grateful, thing to do is to offer at least a pdf?

Quote from: harpy;532300In part 3 I'll be covering some of this.  Not in a systematic way, because there is only so much time I had for data collection, but as I went I noted down hit or miss patterns I saw with various swag.

Overall my impression is that a lot of the little items that would cost a lot per unit aren't really needed for success.  Instead it's about getting specific rewards that let a backer leave their mark on the product, or have a deluxe item that is reserved only for higher funding levels where you can absorb the cost without it being an issue.

The problem I've seen for some of the higher rewards is they get over the top trying to come up with a justification for it, such that the cost winds up being more than the cost of the rewards for an equal amount of smaller bids would add up to.

For example, one computer game offered for a $5000 contribution, to fly the backer to Shanghai to meet the developers and check out the studio.  

It sounds like a cool prize, but then you look at air-fare rates and realize this is probably a minimum $2000 trip they'll be paying for with this guy, and it gives one pause.

That's 2/5ths of that contribution gone, right away, and I doubt many of the lower reward brackets have that kind of cost ratio.  Would they have gotten more money, by simply attracting $5000 worth of backers at a lower level?  

It something  where it's easy to go over board.  One KS for a mobile game recently spend half of a $40,000 funding just on the rewards they'd promised.  

QuoteAs for other costs... it's a tough one because I think it can really just depend on the individual.  My wife is an English teacher and so she's the defacto proofreader and editor.  Not a professional, but good enough to get the job done.

In terms of layout, I'm comfortable doing it on my own using Scribus, but that's me.  I can see how some people might not have the mind for it.  I'm basically just going to look at some of the top selling books in the hobby and just follow generally what they do with layout.  

Generally I find the RPG market to be a fairly forgiving bunch of people.  The hobby isn't very large and has always had a DIY vibe to it, so I'm not too worried about needing huge sums of money to achieve professional tolerances within the publishing field.  Just keep things simple and the "good enough" effect carries a lot of RPG material forward.  It's when you want your product to look like Paizo books that I suspect a lot of complication and potential grief can occur.

One thing I've already found very valuable is all of the support for publishers over at RPGNow.  They have videos and guides to get you through a lot of technical elements of publishing, pushing the bar down very low.

One thing that will help I think for me is this is an OSR project, which means being rather minimalist with the layout is fine.  My actual deliberate target for appearance is something more like AD&D or Metaporphosis Alpha 1e, and that's not a hard mark for my layout editor to hit, and it also means if I have to scale back the art, I can do so and not feel  like I'm losing as much.  

But there's also a part of me that has trouble justifying the paltry rates that RPG folk usually get paid.  I'm a kind hearted sort  with a lot of creative types for friends, and I know how much it can suck getting people just to fucking pay you, let alone enough to actually make the work worthwhile.  

It's like yeah, I know that RPG people get paid a pittance compared to what things go for on the open market, but isn't that kind of a good excuse to try and change that when you can afford it?  It seems like Kickstarter offers that opportunity if it's used right, and it's had that effect elsewhere for sure.  Just kind of a bummer that it doesn't seem to be working like that for everyone in the RPG sphere, but perhaps I'm just being pessimistic with the averages.

It seems to me that the concept of crowd funding is already straying from the original intent.

I think the idea was to help get a company off the ground, not every project forever.  So you crowd fund for the first project, on which you will earn little to nothing, but hopefully create something that increases your reputation to the point that you can privately create the next thing, for which you will make money (and really start your company going).

Now it seems like people want to use the process repeatedly, or companies want to use it (basically) as a pre-order channel.

There isn't necessarily anything wrong with the shift, in fact it might even be a good thing, but the idea that with zero reputation you can make a successful project happen is a bit unlikely.