Thoughts on the Unsuccessful Kickstarter - Postmortem

Here it is! It was a spectacular ride while it lasted, but we fell short of our goal in the end.

To be honest, I wasn't sure that my page and project would be approved. It's clearly an adult oriented project and I was honest about the contents of it. I suppose it was because nothing on the page itself was explicit, the admins didn't seem to notice or care. Had that failed, I would have copied and pasted the project on the next best site, IndieGoGo, since they seem a lot more lax about things. Perhaps I should have, but I'll get to those thoughts in a bit. Things started out extraordinarily well, but it's like they say, the first 48 hours is the most important part.

The Goal

So what happened? Was it just not meant to be? The first thing I thought about was the goal. Was I asking for too much? Had we gotten a lot closer to the goal (around 5k) and failed, I would be more upset about things, but considering how distant we are, I don't think the goal had that much of an influence on people's willingness to contribute. After all, no one paid anything unless we reached 100% of the goal.

Since this was for Updates #9 & #10, I factored in the previous two updates worth of art costs, added in a tiny bit to help with the rent, added in the fees and the would-be taxes. If were talking around 2-2.5k just in art assets PER Update, I was thinking about 5k. Kickstarter did their calculator thing and suggested that I should add on another 2k. Looking back, I probably could have eaten the fees and taxes myself, but even if I only set the goal for 5k, we were still less than 50% of the end goal.

The Incentives

Things were pretty basic, if we're being frank. I wanted to offer something but I knew that I couldn't offer the same sort of rewards as I do elsewhere for the support. If I got just the basic level of funding, but 5-6 people wanted their own bonus dungeon, for example, I would be crushed underneath the weight of the additional work. It would defeat the purpose of trying to get the project completed quickly and I would absolutely burn out at the finish line (which I don't want to do, but Lustfall has been a long journey).

The special edition was for the stretch goal, that was double the initial goal, and that seemed to be the most popular choice at $25 of support. It would be what I would charge for Lustfall once it's complete, if I could. (Well, I COULD, but I won't). The $25 tier in general seems to be the most popular thing on many Kickstarters, so it's wise to have something at that tier if you ever run your own.

Halfway through, I added a few more tiers in between the $1 and $25 tiers, because even though people CAN give ANY amount they wish, most tend to select something that's been predetermined for them. It's the same principle behind suggested tips/donations. I can say that, with 0 adopters of the $5 and $10 tiers that I added, it didn't seem to make much of a difference.

Did my relatively sparse backer incentives hinder the project? Again, I don't think so. If it was an issue, I think I would have received more questions or comments about the available incentives.

The Page Design

When comparing it to other Kickstarters, this is probably the weakest part of the project. I had some old concepts of stuff that I wanted to do for the stretch goal section, but the rest of the page was pretty basic and out-of-the-box looking. I knew what Lustfall was, and so did all of you, so I didn't feel like I needed to razzle-dazzle it up, especially considering that I was sure that the page would be rejected anyways! In hindsight, putting a Lustfall Kickstarter up meant that many people that weren't familiar would see the game for the first time. THESE were the people that a fancier page could have converted. Were their potential numbers significant? Who's to say?

The tricky part about Lustfall is that, unless I can photoshop something form the art I already have, I would have to commission brand new stuff just for marketing. Going all in would've made this a much costlier gamble and in the end, not worth it unless we had reached our goal.

Marketing

Ah, my kryptonite. I can always do better here regardless of the project or end result. I simply don't enjoy this part of the job very much. Despite that, I did make a big deal about the Kickstarter, especially at first. I hit up all of the places that seem to drive traffic from my experience and hammered places like Patreon and the discord consistently since those are the places where the most dedicated Lustfall fans seem to reside. I even commissioned a VTuber (@mamaMarmalade), to promote the Kickstarter in a bit of a late game idea.

If I had to do it again, I would look more into the VTuber and cross promotion stuff. It's difficult to find people who would be a good fit, and I'm not super invested in the lewd-tuber/VTuber culture, so I'm sort of stumbling around here. I would also get in contact with those individuals at the start, instead of near the end. I should've also been more shameless about asking the artists I frequently commission to promote it more. If there's one thing I need help with, it's the social marketing side of things!

Any Final Thoughts?

It's kind of a bummer that the turnout wasn't higher. I'm truly grateful for all of the support from those who backed the project and/or helped with promoting it. That being said, for a game with so many CGs (over 200), nearly 20 hours of gameplay, free, and averaging 20-30 download PER DAY for the past three years, I'm surprised the number of backers wasn't a little higher. There may have been an interesting wrinkle in that, however....

The thing about Kickstarter is that they have very strict accepted methods of payment. Since they seem to ONLY take valid debit or credit cards, it's possible that some (I know for a fact that for at least one person, this is true) people wanted to back, but couldn't due to not having a valid payment method. This means no PayPal or other common forms of digital payment were accepted. Some people, especially those not in the United States, may have no had ANY option to back the project because of this. Others may have not wanted to associate their banking information with a naughty project, but would have backed if there were alternatives.

This is something that I didn't realize until a long time supporter asked me about it and might not have been a deciding factor, but was absolutely a factor over all. It didn't even cross my mind that a narrow method of payment options would affect things like this. Compound that with the fact that this is an adult project, so many people use alternate forms of payment to show their support for whatever reason.

My advice to those who seek to do a nsfw/adult oriented Kickstarter of your own: Be wary of the payment methods that your crowdfunding sites accept. In Kickstarter's case, there's just not enough options for potential backers in our space. It's not something you may think about initially, but once it was pointed out to me I instantly understood.

Where does this leave Lustfall?

Good question! Lustfall will LIVE and continue to be free to everyone. I hope that more people will consider contributing to the project and my game projects in general, even if it's using the "pay what you will/leave a tip" option on THIS very website!

Update #9 is still being worked on. Aside from finishing the final bonus dungeon, there's still some commissions left to get for the battle cards and a whole lot of testing. I might let it sit in Early Access on the Patreon / SubscribeStar once it's ready for a while as I continue to work on my other game project at the moment (so stay tuned for that). I expect it to drop around the end of the year? December/January.

After that, we will be caught up with the pre-development that I had worked on previously, so the timeline of Update #10, the final update, is yet to be seen... even by me. But I do want to finish it as soon as I can. I have been dying to start on the next big project for YEARS now!!

Thank you all for reading my parting thoughts on the unfortunately unsuccessful Lustfall Kickstarter, and I hope you stay tuned for some public info on what you can expect in Update #9! Oh and, be sure to kick a dollar or two my way if you enjoy Lustfall and haven't already done so. ;)

Stay safe and stay kinky~