Kickstarter is the home for creators visited by tech enthusiasts, early adopters and indie gamers, and a great way to tap into a community of early adopters to fund your video game and kick things off into the next steps with the funds you receive.
Do
Build up your audience before you go live
Use Kickstarter pre-save or create an email list. You need to educate your potential backers about your game with emails & social media. Show off your game with what makes it so unique and stand out from the crowd. Backers need a reason to be excited, so give it to them!
Launch with a discount/exclusive rewards
Give an incentive to your backers and a reason why they should trust your campaign through a discounted offer. This could be an early discount or exclusive rewards for the first number of backers. Use the tools Kickstarter offers such as limited or timed rewards.
Create high-quality assets
Launch your game with assets/creatives that show off your game to its full potential using a mix of gameplay and animation shows that you have the capacity to deliver more than just a game and shows that you've put in the effort to make your game the best it can be,
Have a demo ready for potential backers to try the game before you go live or as soon as you go live so players can get hands-on. A demo can also help you tap into influencer networks - Get established players to play your game to their crowd to see if they love it.
Create engagement & a following
Form connections with your network and engage with them online. Your followers won't remember you if you don't stay in their eye line. Use the major social media platforms to post your content, use Polls and Questionnaires to find out what your followers want from you and what they like and ask them to pre-save your Kickstarter or sign up for a newsletter!
Don't
Launch your game without an online following
The element of surprise no longer works. If you don't have any awareness of your game before you go live, you will most likely fail and you will struggle to get people interested. Make sure you have enough pre-save or email leads to make sure you can get close to funded. If you don't have enough potential followers, you may want to rethink your launch date and put some extra effort into growing your community.
Launch your game at full price
With your game in development, you need to give a reason for people to pledge and wait for the final version of your game. After all, you're an indie game, right? There's no need to put your game over the $25+ mark when it won't deliver what most AAA titles can.
Build backers' trust by offering your game at a lower price.
Go in with just a starting concept or idea
Backers want to see what they are investing in and know what the close-to-final game could look like. It's okay to improve this on the way, but don't launch without having quality images or videos of your game.
Rely on your follower count
Typically, followers from your social channels won't lead to guaranteed backers. I've seen hundreds of Twitter accounts with followers in the 10,000's+ but then launch their game with only a few backers.
Your following tends to be others like you or others within the gaming industry and with the number of #WishlistWednesdays, #ScreenshotSaturdays etc that go around every week, you're likely going to build up a false following of users who will give some engagement in the short term, but might not be there when it comes to helping you fund your campaign and handing over their cash.
There are plenty more do's and don'ts to take into consideration when launching a Kickstarter campaign. If you're unsure where to start with your marketing, get in touch.