With the rise of excellent alternative platforms to Kickstarter (and Kickstarter’s continuous improvement), I’ve seen some creators ponder the alternate realities wherein they chose a different platform for their product. Picture Marvel’s “What If?”, but about entrepreneurs instead of superheroes: What if I had launched on Gamefound, BackerKit, Game On Tabletop, Indiegogo, or Fanfare instead of Kickstarter (or vice versa)?
While we’ll never really know, some creators are trying the intriguing strategy of running two campaigns back-to-back on different platforms. Today I’ll explore three examples of this method, the first of which is live on Kickstarter now.
Conquest Princess, a cooperative bag-building game, originally funded on Gamefound on June 22, 2023. It raised a little over $39,000 from 266 backers. (Disclaimer: I’m a backer of this project.) The creator, Fight in a Box, recently launched a follow-up campaign on Kickstarter featuring an expansion for original backers to add to their original pledge or for new backers to get the game and the expansion. It’s raised $7,514 a few days into the campaign from 111 backers.
Here’s what creator Seppy Yoon says on the project page in regards to “Why a Second Campaign?”:
“We want to make the most of our Industry Champion Award. The first campaign ran into a series of unfortunate events outside of our control. With the help of all the amazing backers, we were able to get it across the line. But since this game is nine years in development, we know we can do more!”
I like that there’s something about the new campaign to draw in some original backers, leveraging Kickstarter’s key differentiator (notifications when a friend backs a project) for both old and new backers.
Endeavor: Deep Sea, an underwater exploration game, originally funded on Gamefound on April 25, 2023. It raised over $300,000 from 4,336 backers. The creator, Burnt Island Games, then launched a Kickstarter campaign the next month (May 29), raising around $56,000 USD from 875 backers.
Here’s what the creator says in the FAQ about “Why are you using Kickstarter after a successful Gamefound campaign?”:
“We usually use a pledge manager to collect all of our late pledges. This time we decided to use Kickstarter to do that. We received a great deal of feedback from many folks who told us that they didn’t back our campaign because it wasn’t on Kickstarter. So, here we are.”
It sounds like Burnt Island heard from fans and responded (which, I should note, requires no small amount of effort–setting up a crowdfunding page and running another campaign takes a lot of time!), also using the campaign for late pledges before going to print. They assure original backers in the FAQ that they don’t need to do anything–“just sit back and watch the stretch goals roll in, because you’ll get whatever we unlock here.”
Bird Buddy, a smart bird feeder, originally funded on Kickstarter on January 13, 2021. It raised over $5 million from 22,925 backers. Immediately afterwards, the creator put the project on Indiegogo to the tune of another $3 million.
I can’t find much information about the reasoning for this, but I can say that Indiegogo was once commonly used by creators to continue their Kickstarter campaigns, acting as a publisher’s webstore for until (and sometimes after) the product was manufactured and delivered.
Notably, while the first two examples went from another platform to Kickstarter, Bird Buddy went from Kickstarter to another platform. I’m not sure that one way is necessarily better than the other, though I’m guessing that any platform would prefer for creators to start with them before launching a second campaign elsewhere.
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I’ve also seen other variants of this technique, including simultaneous campaigns for different languages on region-specific platforms and projects to fund a portion of the creation of the product (i.e., just the art), followed by the full campaign later.
While I think most creators don’t want to go through the process of setting up and running multiple campaigns, I always support any methods geared towards better serving backers (including those who missed the first campaign).
This approach can also be particularly useful is if you’re fully prepared to go to production right after the initial campaign ends (which is, I believe, the best way to serve backers), but something arises during the campaign that you believe could be a significant improvement to the product (e.g., the expansion added to the Conquest Princess game).
UPDATE later today: It might be interesting for a creator to create prelaunch pages on more than one platform, then choose where to run the campaign based on the number of followers about a month before launch (so they only have to fully set up 1 page).
Thanks to William (The Hungry Gamer) for bringing this strategy to my attention (and for those, including Garrett, who mentioned these other campaigns). I’m curious to hear your thoughts about it in the comments below!
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Also read:
- Gamefound’s First Launch: Is This the Future of Tabletop Game Crowdfunding?
- An Insider’s Perspective on Gamefound vs Kickstarter
- BackerKit Enters the Crowdfunding Fray!
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9 Comments on “Why Not Both? Running Back-to-Back Crowdfunding Campaigns on Different Platforms”
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Interestingly enough, we actually tried to do this with our first campaign on Kickstarter, and intended to launch it again on gamefound right after, however Gamefound specifically told us no: They want their campaigns to be unique.
We instead waited a year and are now launching a reprint and expansion on Gamefound instead to comapare it Kickstarter:
https://gamefound.com/en/projects/bigger-worlds/cosmos-empires
However, it seems Gamefound has much less passive backers than the Kickstarter campaign did, so if we could launch again on Kickstarter just like conquest princess that could be great.
Thanks for sharing, Martin! I’m very curious to see how this turns out.
Thanks a lot for bringing this interesting topic to your blog Jamey. We use Kickstarter for our projects, but I’ve been wondering about such practices for a while, especially after I learned that Gamefound gives the option to anyone using them as a pledge manager to list their project on their ‘late pledges’ section, even if the live campaign was run on a different platform. I find this an excellent way to ‘experiment’ with having a campaign listed on various platforms. While it’s technically not a live campaign anymore, it’s almost considered as one on Gamefound as the campaign is still promoted to Gamefound visitors. I’d also prefer this method because to me, running the same campaign on various platforms sounds a little pushy and kind of loses its a value. But that might just be me :)
Not sure if anyone has done this before, but another related idea I wanted to share is about running 2 campaigns on the same (or might as well be different) platforms with just a few months from each other. Let’s say you run a campaign in October for a base game, and then another in February for an expansion for the base game, or even a totally different game. The key idea is to ship the 2 campaigns together and while it’s a lot of work of course, in a world of increasing shipping, raw material and prices in general, this (in my opinion) could result in huge savings for both Backers and Creators (and the environment!). For instance if someone backs both campaigns, they’d only need to pay for shipping in 1 of the campaigns. So, the Backer can experience being part of 2 campaigns, pay 1 shipping, and the Creator can manufacture more games at the same time, and freight ship all together. Curious to know what you and everyone else thinks about this. We might try this out within the next 10-12 months.
That’s a good point about Gamefound’s late pledge visibility.
In the past, Kickstarter has tried to discourage creators from having multiple unfulfilled campaigns, though I haven’t seen much enforcement for it. If you don’t have any other unfulfilled campaigns at the time, it’s something to try. I’ve seen a few other creators do it (I think Thunderworks and Bezier have done it), though I only really noticed it when I received the pledge manager for the shipping costs, so I’m not sure if it’s something they planned or if the timing just happened to work out that way on the back end. The risk is that one product could end up delaying the other, so I’d only recommend trying this if you’re 99% ready to go to print on both products when you launch the campaigns.
Very good point Jamey! And thanks for bringing Thunderworks and Bezier to our attention. Will check them out. Also true about the risk. Definitely have to think this through. Thank you!
I only discovered Gamefound after finding and pledging on the Endeavor: Deep Sea Kickstarter project. Now, a whole new backer platform has been opened to me that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. I missed out on the new “extreme version” of Burgundy and other projects that I would have liked to have been ready for, but I look forward to future creators’ offerings on Gamefound.
As a publisher, it is tempting. Gamefound and Kickstarter certainly have audience overlap but I am sure the KS audience is larger. We are in late pledge on Gamefound with a campaign right now. We certainly owe it to these backers to move as quickly as feasible to manufacturing. It creates some interesting dilemmas. First, how do you handle stretch goals? We had some Gamefound exclusive stretch goals. I think it would be disingenuous to include those very stretch goals in a Kickstarter launch. Second, do you prioritize shipping for one campaign over another? Hmm. These are messy. I think that means you would need to plan and execute carefully to avoid alienating backers.
While I think this is another reason not to offer exclusives (opposed to free promos available for purchase later), I applaud your integrity in keeping Gamefound-exclusive stretch goals solely for the Gamefound backers. There’s no way around it at this point.
I think I’d merge all shipping data and let the fulfillment centers figure out the most optimized way to handle the shipout.
Yep, agree with both comments. I think with this launch we will stick with the Gamefound only decision (not launch on KS) but will keep this option in mind for future launches.