The active Kickstarter projects discussion thread.

[matt]

That is a bummer about Sumo Boy, but great news about Reading Rainbow breaking the records. Hopefully it'll make a real difference in literacy.

[Harry Sunderland]

Relevant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5G5qtWG5oO8

[LobsterSundew]

There are many poor quality campaigns launching right now. I've been busy converting video clips into animated GIFs for a campaign planning to launch soon. I had to upgrade to Imgur Pro to support larger files and to have more graphs.

I expected a very bad looking campaign when I clicked on Solarix. What I found is a project sitting with just 2 backers that is a first-person survival horror game made with Unreal 4. Then I saw it was from the people who brought Project Nimbus to Kickstarter.

The Grandfather. I'm NOT making POTATO SALAD! I'm making an Indie Game is from the dev of The Lady. Another project with just 2 backers. The pitch has a vvveerrryyy sssllloooowww feel to it. A Polygon article explains potato salad on Kickstarter.

Mad Joan Run is an action runner with some good pixel art and action.

Twin Souls is not doing very well. It is trending to 48% on Kicktraq. I thought it would do much better when it first appeared. Many other campaigns don't look like they can make it.

[matt]

I think the Potato Salad is pretty awesome. I think it is kind of silly when people say what you can and can't crowdfund. If a potato salad can unite thousands of people, that's not a bad thing. I doubt people diverted funds from other projects o make a potato salad a reality. The sad thing is there are now like 100 food project copycat projects.

Has Project Nimbus shipped yet? It seems strange stating a new kickstarter before the last one finished... I guess maybe Kiss Ltd might just run kickstarters for other companies since Project Nimbus is apparently based in Thailand and Solarix is based in Turkey...

[LobsterSundew]

Project Nimbus looks like it is making progress.

Tormentum - Dark Sorrow is a fixed funding campaign for a horror adventure game. Some of the sound effects are bit loud so turn down your speakers.

Knuckle Club is a brawler with a pixel art style that fits the tone well.

Ninja Pizza Girl is a 2.5D freerunning game.

Bacon Man is a 2.5D platformer.

Kickstarter changed the project approval process. The Recently Launched section feels less effective because of so many junk campaigns are launching and burying the actual good projects. There are a lot of Let's Players trying to fund new gaming computers through Kickstarter now. Summers have always been worse for junk projects even before the process changes.

The potato salad campaign isn't a problem as it is an actual project and is entertaining. It is the campaigns like Nothing Simulator 2015 that I see harming the Kickstarter brand because they aren't really entertaining or creating value. Jim Sterling did a rant 3 days ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMfO7wuTTr0

[matt]

I wonder if the change to the approval process will turn people off about funding projects and checking new releases. With the huge numbers of games being Greenlit on Steam (plus the large numbers of old games being released), the "new releases" category is basically worthless on Steam. A lot of people used that to see what was cool and the advantage of having a curated marketplace was that you knew if something was on Steam, it was probably legit. Between that and Early Access, people can't implicitly "trust" games on Steam.

Besides the all or nothing funding, I think Kickstarter did a pretty good job of filtering out that really bad projects. With the new approval process, I wonder if people's faith in the platform be shaken. Who knows!

[ranger_lennier]

It at least increases the need for external sources--whether they be large gaming websites or a single person's blog--to curate Steam games and Kickstarter projects. I never really just randomly peruse Kickstarter projects, but I've backed a few mentioned on this forum, for instance.

[matt]

I guess that means Lobster has more responsibility than before!

Lobster - it seems like you were previously checking out every new game project every day. Is there such an increase in volume that it's infeasible? That seems to bode poorly for the new release actually being helpful... :-/

[LobsterSundew]

Snot stars a a mollusc protagonist.

Jotun is getting ready to launch.

Inherit the Earth: Sand and Shadows is an adventure game sequel set in a medival land populated by animals.

I guess that means Lobster has more responsibility than before!

Lobster - it seems like you were previously checking out every new game project every day. Is there such an increase in volume that it's infeasible? That seems to bode poorly for the new release actually being helpful... :-/

From December 2011 to March 2014 I had scrolled over the entire Recently Launched feed clicking on any of the projects that stood out. I click on every Video Games project. I still go over the Recently Launched feed, but much faster and with more of a focus on the Film and Games categories. I will also do searches for the last 24 hours of Kickstarter related posts on the Internet.

I've backing projects on Kickstarter since May 2011. It has never felt this bad for a surge of poor quality campaigns before. More than half are not expected to make it. Many are grey about how they fit in the guidelines. I notice that a lot of them uploaded images for their thumbnail images that weren't even formatted to fit. Both Summer months and the last half of a month attract poorly researched campaigns.

In 8 days it will have been a year since the last posted episode of Lobster's List for Kickstarter. It was intended as a way to help aggregate the small campaigns that deserved attention. Kickstarter Katchup also ended about a year ago.

I've been messaging crowdfunding analytics/tool sites trying to get someone to adopt my way of tracking campaigns. If I could get graph creation (I manually stitch with GIMP) and projections automated then it would free up enough time that I could potentially resume producing episodes. It could also mean expanding the analysis to more categories than Video Games. The server costs look like they would be an issue because of the larger CPU demand per project than what Kicktraq needs. It would make such a site much more difficult to be profitable.

Kickstarter's curated pages is an idea with potential. It would work similar to the developer lists on Ouya's store. It would need some way for people with Kickstarter accounts to subscribe to a curated page (Not the RSS system) so that a notification would go out when a new project has been added to the page.

Currently, Timespinner at $86,000 is the biggest active campaign for the category followed by InSomnia at $77,000. There isn't a million dollar project right now to be excited about. Sunset was the closest thing to a superstar class campaign for July for Video Games. Superstar campaigns bring more visitors to the platform which helps the smaller projects. The lack of one right now is worrying.
http://i.imgur.com/IVVIwxx.png

Twin Souls didn't make its goal. I did not see much mentions of it in a last 24 hours search on the day it ended. It only had 8 comments on its last day. The Bitly analytics showed very little activity.
http://i.imgur.com/RUD7bup.png

I was a backer on Yogventures that has run into a development nightmare.

Last week we announced that everyone concerned will get a copy of TUG. Nerd Kingdom's game is still in alpha but is shaping up to be everything we wanted Yogventures to be. In addition, we have organised for Nerd Kingdom to have the source code, assets and designs of Yogventures to ensure we're making best use of Winterkewl's work.

There was a GDC talk linked to on Reddit that can be applied to making Kickstarter pitch videos.

I've been looking at the effectiveness of ThunderClap for Kickstarter campaigns. It might be something I recommend in the future.

[matt]

I'd be interested to hear how well Thunderclap works. I also heard about Prefundia from Erin on Nevermind or Tyler from Darkest Dungeon. (I can't remember which - maybe both?) Is that a platform that people check? At the very least, you could tweet out your prefundia page and get your supporters to sign up - although perhaps they'd sign up for your own mailing list.

I'm not sure if people like being on mailing lists these days although I think we have over 500 on our Neverending Nightmares one. I suppose signing up for our mailman based list is a bigger pain since we have confirmation and all that, so we don't want to spam, so a combination of prefundia and thunderclap might really give your campaign a strong start...

I guess things to think about for next time around!