Where The Seven Dragon Saga Kickstarter Went Wrong

[dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap] once covered a variety of reasons why developers should avoid launching crowdfunding campaigns during the holiday season. But it’s spring now, right? All the biggest, most expensive holidays are passed, right? So why did the Seven Dragon Saga, a game that had a developed concept, an experienced team, and nostalgic appeal fail? Actually, it’s not so hard to understand.

While a number of members from TSI are from the classic RPG developer SSI, the weight of such a reputation may be lost on many, many gamers today given A) when SSI’s best known work was released and B) the difficulty in playing these titles beyond an emulator today. Champions of Krynn, a dungeon crawl AD&D game on DOS, was released in 1990, which was 25 years ago. This was also the same year the popular Eye of the Beholder game was released. Why is this relevant? Because Kickstarter’s major demographic is men between the ages of 18-34. They make up over %45 of Kickstarter’s traffic. For many people who fall in this age range, chances were, you were too young to play these games, even if home PC’s were more accessible at the time. Keep in mind, that still doesn’t mean they were as ubiquitous as they are now. A kid with access to a computer–one that could play games no less–was a lucky kid indeed. So there’s potential reason number one: the demographic was largely indifferent to TSI’s history as developers–which was a big selling point for them, and a detail many sites (no doubt written by older/saavy gamers) focused on.

The second potential reason was their 5 minute (read: long) introduction video. There’s no nuance to it, no finesse. The first two minutes consists of the dev team introducing themselves, then talking about old school RPGs and how they want to bring them back. Again, what TSI was assuming here was that a generation of gamers would care to hear them talk when, in all likelihood, they weren’t even old enough to play their games. Backers like it when the campaign cuts to the chase and presents their product. Sadly, once TSI finally got around to showing video for it, they failed to generate any sense of excitement. It played very much like a dry, drawn-out presentation. The intro video functions as the hook that draws many backers in, because it can effectively convince of a project’s potential in very little time. Ideally, this is the place where devs hype their story, show off game graphics, and then give a QUICK overview of gameplay. I’m really not sure why TSI thought it would be good to start their sales pitch off with a lot of reminiscing instead.

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Now, the ultimate reason I feel Seven Dragon Saga did not succeed? Its MASSIVE funding goal. They had actually raised quite a bit of money for a game on Kickstarter. The last count was over $106k. About %40 of that money appeared in the first few days of the campaign. Yet after the initial buzz that led to all the SSI fans, hipsters, and RPG fanatics coming out of the woodwork, the funding flow dropped dramatically, and reality set in. TSI’s director David Klein admitted himself that they didn’t have enough material to entice backers that weren’t familiar with SSI’s history. Thankfully, he’s stated their intent to try again at a later time soon.