Ever since Gamefound expanded to include full-fledged crowdfunding campaigns, I’ve been impressed as a backer with how quickly they managed to compete with Kickstarter. Gamefound has been very open and responsive to my questions (see articles linked below). However, I haven’t heard a detailed report from a creator who has used Gamefound.
Earlier this week, I had a nice email exchange with Sami Laakso, probably best known for Dale of Merchants. He ran a Gamefound campaign in October 2021 for Lands of Galzyr, an open-world game that I backed, and after a brief discussion about Gamefound’s pledge manager system, I asked Sami if he would answer some more detailed questions about his experience with Gamefound and Kickstarter. Sami kindly agreed, and his answers are below.
***
Greetings! It’s my honour and pleasure to share my experiences using Gamefound with you, both from a backer’s and a creator’s view. Thanks Jamey for inviting me and for the questions.
For those unfamiliar with Gamefound, it’s a crowdfunding platform similar to Kickstarter with the differentiation being that it can only be used to host board gaming related projects. For years, it was known as a pledge manager platform. Only recently have they added a possibility to host crowdfunding campaigns as well.
Now onto the questions!
Why did you choose to use Gamefound instead of Kickstarter for Lands of Galzyr?
One of my biggest reasons for using Gamefound is the fact that Finnish people and companies still can’t host projects on Kickstarter without the help of a third party. Gamefound supports a larger number of countries, making it easier and safer for someone like myself to run a crowdfunding campaign.
Gamefound’s support has also been highly responsive to my communication, which is in quite stark contrast to Kickstarter which has grown so large it’s hard to get ahold of anyone in a reasonable time.
What were a few of your favorite elements on Gamefound after running a campaign there?
Two of the biggest are the integrated pledge manager and the more robust project page. Anyone who has ran or took part in a board game crowdfunding campaign has probably seen the need and pros of using a pledge manager. Personally, I can’t see myself running a project without using one. Having everything under a single site makes the process that much more streamlined by keeping everyone on the same site for the campaign, late pledges, updates, pledge manager, and more.
As for the campaign page, it’s nice to be able to navigate it from a submenu instead of what sometimes feels like infinite scrolling. The rewards and addons are also showcased better in my opinion. Building and editing the page is easier with the editor, for example being able to include video files instead of GIFs. The editor does come with its own usability problems but hopefully those get ironed out as time passes.
What did you miss about Kickstarter after running a campaign on Gamefound?
After using the platform for over half a year, there’s actually not much I miss from Kickstarter. The biggest must be the lack of notifications for new comments. Therefore some can fly under the radar for a while until I realise a new one has popped up.
Another is obviously the sheer size of Kickstarter and its audience. While a creator is responsible for the initial success of their project, the ecosystem it is hosted in can boost that success based on its popularity. There’s no denying that Kickstarter is a few orders of magnitude larger compared to Gamefound, which obviously does lead to having to fight for more visibility.
Which platform did you find easier to set up and edit the prelaunch project page and why?
I touched this a bit earlier – my vote goes for Gamefound. Their editor divides the page both for the backers as well as the creator. This makes it more manageable to browse and edit large project pages.
Gamefound also lets the creator populate the FAQ ahead of time.
See also this video from Heath Robinson about landing and pre-launch pages on Gamefound.
Which platform’s prelaunch system did you prefer and why?
Another vote to Gamefound from me. While Kickstarter doesn’t support much outside of a simple image and a follow button, Gamefound lets creators build as large or small prelaunch page they wish. This is separate to the actual project page so creators can show their selected content to everyone before the launch and keep working on the actual page behind the scenes.
Kickstarter’s big advantage, in my opinion, are notifications that people get when they follow other creators or backers. Do you think the lack of that mechanism negatively impacts Gamefound campaigns?
It’s a neat feature, definitely. As a crowdfunding platform grows larger, it’s more and more important to have ways for people to find projects interesting to them.
While visibility isn’t yet a big problem on Gamefound, simply due to the limited number of campaigns, it can become much worse if it grows in popularity. At that time, I hope for them to implement something similar to Kickstarter.
Have you required a personal level of customer service for projects on either platform? If so, how would you compare the two?
As Kickstarter is a much older, more mature platform, information on its usage was easier to find without contacting support. The few times I have contacted them, it’s a toss-up if or when I hear back from them.
I’ve had much more problems using Gamefound. Partly because it’s a new platform with some growing pains but also because it has much more features, making it more complex to understand. When I have had questions, my contact on Gamefound has usually been highly responsive.
They have also claimed to take my constructive feedback of some missing or misbehaving features to heart. It remains to be seen if and how they will take those into account in future updates.
Gamefound has a built-in pledge manager. Does that instantly make it better than Kickstarter’s basic survey? What are some of the pros and cons you found by using Gamefound’s pledge manager?
I would say that to be one of the biggest wins for them. Having a robust shopping cart feature during the campaign and being able to turn that into late pledges and pledge manager is a huge bonus.
The implementation, especially the pledge manager, could still use a lot of improvement however. That’s actually the origin of Jamey contacting me in the first place. When I informed everyone who hasn’t completed their Lands of Galzyr pledges, Jamey got confused. He was sure he had done so, as did many others. Without going into details, it’s easy to think one has completed their pledge when they in fact have not. And it’s not as simple to complete it as I’d hope.
[From a backer perspective, I agree with Sami that pledge completion status needs some work on Gamefound. When he told me that I hadn’t completed the pledge manager, there was every indication on Gamefound that my side of the transaction was complete. Until this is improved, I’d recommend that backers go to the project page itself when in doubt and look at the right sidebar–that’s where I was able to find (with Sami’s help) that I hadn’t actually finalized my address and paid for shipping.]Which platform will you use for your next crowdfunding project?
While I haven’t set that decision in stone yet, I’ll most likely use Gamefound again in the future. The simple fact that I don’t need to mess with a third party to launch a project, combined with the included pledge manager and responsive support, make the decision rather easy.
My hat goes off to Kickstarter for, well, kickstarting the whole crowdfunding era. It’s truly amazing how it has made it possible for small creators like myself to seek funding directly from individuals, bypassing many traditional gatekeepers. While crowdfunding is definitely time-consuming and not for everyone, the existence of it is inspiring.
Anyone interested in my upcoming projects can join my friendly Discord server or join my email newsletter.
For your platform of choice, is there anything you haven’t mentioned that you would like to evolve and improve?
I’ll misbehave a little and share my hopes for both platforms. For Kickstarter, I simply hope for them to open their doors to more creators from smaller countries. For Gamefound, I look forward to comment notifications and a more streamlined pledge manager.
Lastly, I want to end by saying that the mere existence of more than one competing platform is good for everyone, both backers and creators alike.
If you have any questions, I’ll try to pop in from time to time and reply in the comments!
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Thank you so much, Sami! This was really interesting, and I look forward to hearing from other creators in the comments. For open-world curious gamers like myself, you can learn more about Lands of Galzyr here.
Also read:
- Gamefound’s First Launch: Is This the Future of Tabletop Game Crowdfunding?
- The Fascinating Difference Between the Future Visions of Kickstarter and Gamefound
- Day 1 Lessons Learned from Gamefound (video)
- The Case for Gamefound for New Creators and Designers
If you gain value from the 100 articles Jamey publishes on this blog each year, please consider championing this content!
32 Comments on “An Insider’s Perspective on Gamefound vs Kickstarter”
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[…] An Insider’s Perspective on Gamefound vs Kickstarter […]
Hi, I have a big problem. I started a Kickstarter campaign in March 2022 and plan to ship in May 2023. But due to Kickstarter limitations I can’t launch a new campaign before finishing the first one, so I should do the second one on Gamefound. But when does Kickstarter consider a campaign finished? When did all the games ship?
Carlo: Kickstarter only sometimes enforces that rule–I think it’s the most important that you’ve regularly conveyed progress to backers. So you might be able to launch on Kickstarter depending on how your original project is moving forwards.
Thanks, Jamey for your quick reply! Really appreciated it.
The problem is that we are a small start up with a limited budget and we don’t want to find ourselves in May when we have to launch the Campaign and we find out that Kickstarter won’t let us Submit the page :D Unfortunately Kickstarter customer service is slightly non-existent, so we don’t we know who to ask for assistance.
You can go ahead and submit an early version of the page to Kickstarter now to see if they approve it.
Okay. Then I try. Thanks so much again for your replies.
[…] An Insider’s Perspective on Gamefound vs Kickstarter: In this interview with Lands of Galzyr creator Sami Laakso, who has used both Kickstarter and Gamefound, Sami commends both platforms but ultimately says he will most likely choose Gamefound in the future: “The simple fact that I don’t need to mess with a third party to launch a project, combined with the included pledge manager and responsive support, make the decision rather easy.” […]
I backed Chronicles of Drunagor on Gamefound, and I’m not sure if it’s due to the publisher or Gamefound, but pledge completion after the campaign wrapped up has been a disaster, compounded by insanely higher than expected shipping charges. It has not given me much confidence in the platform.
Thanks for sharing! Do you have any specifics about how the issues are related to Gamefound specifically? They’re a platform–they have nothing to do with selecting shipping prices or the actual fulfillment of rewards.
The publisher, apparently working with Gamefound, tried to implement an installment payment program (I think they called is EasyPay), but when the campaign had wrapped up the installment payment option didn’t play nice with the rest of the Gamefound platform, which lead to a bunch of difficulties. People who pledged early were supposed to get free items added to their pledge – that didn’t happen automatically, and I’m not sure if it has actually been resolved. Shipping prices came in much higher than forecast initially, with some oddities like 2 wave shipping being cheaper than 1 wave shipping. The shipping got recalculated and updated, and lead to some people getting refunds, and some people having to pay more, but having balances too low to allow them to make an additional payment. And the publisher has been terrible at responding to email requests for support – there are multiple comments in the comment forum about people who have been waiting for weeks or months to get a response. Not all of this falls on Gamefound, obviously, but the whole thing has been opaque enough for me to lose trust in both the publisher and Gamefound.
I’m not familiar with the campaign in question but having used GameFound from the other side some of those issues sounds like they emanate from the GameFound website and UI which again, is not great. As mentioned, creators don’t get notified of comments in the GameFound forum, and when a backer mails GameFound with an issue it not only just gets delayed and bounced on to the creator, but it gets bounced on to the creator with no method of direct reply. As such if a backer does message through GameFound requesting support then if it gets to the creator they then have to track down the backer’s e-mail separately. Actually, since in my case some people were mailing about issues with GameFound the only way I could respond was to find their e-mail address from my Kickstarter survey to get back to them, without Kickstarter I’d have been powerless to do anything.
On the adding of items to early pledges, as I said the GameFound flow through on pledges is absolutely horrible, its extremely tough to control time or amount limited pledge levels. I had a level for playmats which I had to order and close off separately from the other pledge levels and it was a nightmare. Again, having used CrowdOx which has a far easier to use and more powerful system for controlling exactly which backers have access to which add ons and upgrades it is possible to do better. It seems to me that the main attraction to GameFound as a pledge manager up to this point was simply that it was free and because of that its really not been held to a very high standard in its development.
I prefer Gamefound, but I think there are a few things they need to fix:
– If you unfollow a project, stop sending emails. I continue to get updates from projects I unfollowed.
– Let users see the full update in an email without having to click through to the website. They are already a backer of the project.
– In projects I backed, let me archive and organize them. Let me mark if I’ve received them. Let me mark if I’ve completed the PM. Let me rate them. Right now it’s just a messy list of games, even those I dropped my pledge for. This section needs the most work.
– Put the end date and time of a campaign in the main section, not in the hidden “learn more” area.
– Let me follow/subscribe to certain publishers on the platform, and even other backers. If I’m a fan of company X, let me see when they have an upcoming game. If I’m a friend or follower of Y person, let me be able to see what they are backing or following. Make it more of a community.
– Get some APIs built around the platform like those KS has. There are sites like Kicktraq that can show lots of useful data, the flow of backs, etc. People love data. Seeing trends is important and interesting.
I’m sure there are more, but I cannot stress how much they need to fix the backed projects section. It should be among their highest priorities right now.
Kickstarter has since backed off on it, but one of the reasons I started thinking about backing campaigns on Gamefound was their declaration that they were going to move to blockchain. I’ve seen several creators in other sectors move elsewhere as a result, but I’m curious if the same is true of board game creators.
After creating a dozen projects on Kickstarter, I’m trying Gamefound for the first time with our next campaign. The audience size is the biggest concern for me.
But what makes me feel better about it is how Gamefound shows you upcoming projects. I haven’t even told our community about the pre-launch page and it already has 84 followers in about 2 weeks — they all just found it from browsing Gamefound. When I used to setup a Kickstarter pre-launch page, as far as I could tell, KS brought 0 pre-followers.
I think I’d pledge more on Gamefound if publishers supported smaller retailers. I started a small shop just before the pandemic. Had to shut the store down, but still kept it creatively going by renting out a booth, but mostly deliver my products locally and/or ship. Some publishers are not about that life, even though I’m happy to purchase 10x copies. I know that isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, but if I grow, so does my purchasing power.
I remember in an interview that they also talked about sharing their experience of managing a board game project with creators on the platform.
Helping with logistics and such…
Can you talk about that?
Hi Tomer!
They have a blog (https://gamefound.com/blog) describing some tips and webinars. I don’t have knowledge of other things outside of those.
From what I’ve seen, Gamefound also has better built-in support for charging VAT.
I’ve worked on a few campaigns in Gamefound now (most recently Last Light) and agree. GF’s greatest issue is the low audience. We had more than 7K audience sign ups before launching and made 500K.
On Kickstarter, Flamecraft, another I helped some with, had over 6K audience signed up and it made 2mil.
There’s definitely a case of apples and oranges here, but I saw the difference in audience. KS just brings a great deal of foot traffic to your project. In most cases, it can be 40-50% of your backers. People still don’t remember to check out Gamefound on Tuesdays.
Just a comment … my family absolutely adores Flamecraft. I even got my angsty teenager to play with us, which is saying something! Thank you for making such a quality game. 😊
As a creator I’ve used Crowd Ox pledge manager on a previous campaign and I’m using GameFound currently and I have to say, I really regret using GameFound and don’t think I’ll be back as a pledge manager, much less for a full project launch. Considering that GameFound was developed as a pledge manager first its flow through system for pledges and upgrades and the ability to control which backers have access to which is largely absent and what there is requires all manner of bodged solutions. For a small creator GameFound not having an option to rank projects by newest first is a real killer, on Kickstarter every project gets a clearly defined time in the spotlight as everyone is certain to be top of the newest page for a time and eventually the time remaining searches, on GameFound you’re reliant on not very clear algorithms for passing traffic meaning you’re really very reliant on bringing your own crowd, at which point its hard to know what GameFound is actually supplying. Added to that, all the issues already mentioned, why I can be notified of comments responding to the post I’m currently making but not comments on a GameFound project is baffling. Considering that a GameFound project is live forever and doesn’t notify creators of either comments or new pledges it essentially means checking in manually in perpetuity to avoid missing new pledges.
On top of that, I have to say that the UI seems full of horrible choices, who ever thought that pale green font on off white backgrounds for menus was a good idea needs to be shot.
bingo, there must be some way of sorting through things
As a first-time creator, I’m planning on using Kickstarter, though as someone formally working in the digital world, the many practical pros of Gamefound appeal to me, especially those that address some of the technical limitations of Kickstarter.
However, the thing that keeps me wanting to use Kickstarter is just the size, reach and history of usage in that community. Obviously, one has to grow their audience of people interested in your project in advance of your campaign, regardless of which platform you use, but at the same time it just seems that currently Kickstarter presents much more opportunity to have others discover your campaign.
I’m thinking about using KS for the first few games that I publish, as I build my own audience. Thereafter, I’ll go with Gamefound, most likely.
Biggest issue i have as a backer is there is very little way to manage all your pledges, via anything other than 1 giant blog of a mess, sorted in a manner that’s nearly useless. Gamefound needs to give backers a way to manager/hide projects previously backed, and/or sorting the list. It would also be ideal to be able to follow companies/creators like mentioned by you. The sorting through old projects is not friendly once you have more than a dozen or so backed.
I told Gamefound something similar a year ago or so. They thanked me for my feedback, but none of my suggestions was implemented. As a superbacker, I find kickstarter much easier.
Gamefound is fine for people that backed 5 or less projects. When you get to 30-50, it becomes chaotic and unmanageable.
I definitely share the sentiment that managing your pledges (as a backer) needs some work on Gamefound!
I just went to have a look at my backed projects page and it’s really unclear which ones are live, pledged, in PM or completed – That information is really clear on Kickstarter and it has a chunky tick box for me to tag which are complete from my perspective.
Now that I’m up to 10 ‘Backed Projects’ on the platform that’s starting to be a concern ^^.
“Finnish people and companies still can’t host projects on Kickstarter without the help of a third party.” Any idea why this is?
Hopefully a Finnish Backer or creator will be along to confirm, but I believe Finnish legislation (Fundraising Act) prohibits the collection of funds without a direct physical reward. With KS you’re investing in a project, and if all goes to plan you’ll hopefully get a reward in exchange. You can also simply pledge to support the project. Finnish legislation prohibits that I believe. Or something.
They require the use of collaborators as a way around not being registered in different countries:
“However this global expansion has not
been straight forward. Today Kickstarter
is present in 14 European countries: the
United Kingdom, Denmark, Ireland,
Norway, Sweden, the Netherlands,
Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Austria,
Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxembourg.
European creatives based in countries
where Kickstarter is not officially
operating, can still launch projects if
they have a collaborator or subsidiary in
one of the countries where Kickstarter
is officially operating. Such restriction
does not apply to backers, and currently
anyone in the world can back a project
on Kickstarter in return for a reward,
allowing creatives to appeal to an
international backer’s environment.”
Hi Adrian!
It’s indeed pretty much as Stephen laid it out. We can host crowdfunding projects without problems as long as we give something in return to the backers. Basically eliminating the “give 1 dollar/euro as a gift” option is enough. Just that Kickstarter hasn’t still made that possible for us.
Probably partnering with payment solutions, taxes etc.