Who in the world is Lobster Sundew? Lobster, otherwise known as Ian Kragh, is one of the most prolific miners of Kickstarter video game data around. Read almost any Kickstarter thread in a video game forum and you’ll most likely seem him chime in with a mind blowing amount of data, analysis, and commentary. Invaluable for developers, and deeply interesting for backers, Lobster’s insights are a must-read for anyone involved in the crowdfunding community. Fortunately for us Lobster has agreed to let us share his postings in a more public setting. A word of warning though, there’s a lot of information on a variety of campaigns and funding concepts in Lobster’s Kickstarter video game analysis, so take your time and don’t be afraid to ask questions in the comments.
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now had some backers complaining its last project update was on January 29th. February 14th finally saw a new project update which was confusing enough that a second update soon followed clarifying some things.
One backer brought up the very good point that the strategy of relocating the campaign to the developer’s own website did not work for Shadow of the Eternals. It has also not worked for projects that migrated to Indiegoo. Consortium: The Tower did do well after migrating to Fig, but Fig has more quality control than Kickstarter. Something to realize is that for many frequent backers on Kickstarter, they are also supporting the idea of Kickstarter when they support a project.
There are already other backers commenting how the Apocalypse Now developer should have waited to launch their funding site until after the Kickstarter campaign ended or was canceled. There is a potential trust/transparency problem when the developer controls the crowdfunding site collecting the pledges. The Kickstarter campaign is now in a state of undeath as efforts shift towards migrating backers to their website. Many experienced backers are unlikely to migrate.
The project creator account made a comment that they only spent a period of 30 days working on the Kickstarter project page before launching. That is a rush. I find it often takes the span of 2 months to do a good job. The Verge published an article about the history of the studio behind the project.
Here are updated graphs:
Unlocking the $25 tier cannibalized the $35 tier. This harmed the efficiency of the campaign each time someone downgraded from $35 to $25 (a $10 decrease).
The $25, $35, $50 and $225 tiers had progress going backwards after the February 14th project update went up. It is unclear how many backers are pulling their pledges to relocate to the new platform and how many backers are quitting the project.
Unholy Night
Unholy Night launched very late at night and sat with zero backers for awhile. The pitch video is 48 seconds long. Some of the text in the graphics on the project page is so small it is hard to read.
[iframe width=”480″ height=”270″ src=”https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1251527936/unholy-night-snes-fighting-game-console-cartridge/widget/video.html” frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”][/iframe]I remember hearing about it before.
It will be interesting to see how well it does on Wednesday. The project appears to be way too rushed.
Misc.
The developers of Isleron: The Rending have announced they will launch a campaign on Kickstarter in April.
Mobot Studios of Knite & The Ghost Lights is no more.
Torment: Tides of Numenera did a shout-out for Beautiful Desolation.
Final Prophet has a stretch goal goal chart up to $5,000,000.
