Display Your Laurels (KS Lesson #278)

If you’re crowdfunding or accepting preorders for a product and this isn’t your first experience as a creator, designer, or publisher, are you displaying your laurels?

A few days ago I decided to speedwatch a video from IV Games in which Austin discusses 3 different current crowdfunding campaigns. I learned a lot from the advice he shares in examining the project pages, and I highly recommend checking out the video series.

Here’s a video embed of the portion of the video I’ll discuss today (10:27):

Austin lists a few things he seeks from those who have at least a small portfolio of work (even if it’s your first campaign, you or someone involved in the project has some relevant experience to share), including this: “You want to have–if you’ve had games before that are successful–laurels, some kind of praise for your past games.”

Here are the laurels for Divinus that Austin is referring to. It’s kind of a combination of Lucky Duck’s mission statement and some well-known games of theirs. They could have also included awards here, but I like the focus on simply saying who they are and what they’re known for (along with a few relevant data points):

While many hobby gamers may know that Lucky Duck created Chronicles of Crime and Destinies, there are also probably plenty of people who didn’t make that connection or could use the reminder. It’s particularly important here because Lucky Duck is trying to establish trust and generate excitement for another digital-hybrid game–hence the two examples they chose (and I like that they only chose 2 examples, not an exhaustive list of games and awards).

The only thing I might change about this image is to add the Lucky Duck name and icon to it. While it won’t usually be shown out of context as it is here, the more they can help people remember the connection between their brand and their games, the better. Also, while the logos of the games work fine, I think the visual of seeing the Chronicles of Crime and Destinies boxes are even more evocative.

I looked through a few other projects I recently backed, and I didn’t actually find other examples of laurel images. I know Divinus isn’t alone, though, so please share your examples in the comments below.

Instead, many other projects seem to display their laurels in their “team section.” For example, Here’s a snippet from the Earthborne Rangers project page, which I’ll be highlighting soon for a different topic:

This approach is fine, and the lack of limits of text can be helpful. But I think potential backers are more likely to notice a laurel image highlighting a few game images than just the names of those games in text.

Also, I understand that there may be some hesitation about boasting about your past work. But I think it’s all in the presentation. There’s nothing boastful about saying that you’ve published X game, the designer is known for Y game, and the artist created the visuals for Z game. Really, that’s helpful information for your customers.

Last, are laurels helpful when you move past crowdfunding and run preorders on your website? I tend to think they’re much less necessary then, because your other games are probably visible in the header of the page that customers are looking at. I don’t think it hurts, but if I added a such an image to a product page, it would be a slim, streamlined graphic.

Thanks to Austin for the inspiration–I’ll be watching for more tips and advice on your channel to discuss here in the future! If readers have any thoughts or examples of laurels, please share in the comments.

UPDATE: Here’s an image we now use in a few places:

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Also read: Kickstarter Lesson #66: The Psychological Benefits of Framing Your Project’s Potential

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