The Other Brothers Kickstarter open discussion on tricks, tips and why KS can fail

I doubt it'll cost much on mobile, but it might on desktop, be a similar price, depending on content. As content expands, the backers will never pay more.

 

Hippo - I feel bad writing this post. I like you or I would never be this blunt. But, you asked, so here's my thoughts, with apologies, in advance.

TL;DR. SHOW DON'T TELL. Quirky is okay, wasting my time is not. Drop 90% of the text and voice blabbing - Less is more and you need LOTS of it. Show your PASSION! Be quick and interesting.

Long version:

* The marketing pitch is awful. It looks and feels unprofessional, not quirky. I felt disrespected as a viewer. It's too long, it's obnoxiously boring, and it focuses on nothing that I care about. The intro with the dad and his kids made me cringe - I'm a husband and father of 2.

* You forgot your story. You actually have a wonderful story, but you left it by the wayside. If the kids are NOT part of the story, don't include them. See my blog for articles on writing stories.

* Your passion is lost - Whatever it is, I can't feel it. All I felt was a lot of ... blah blah blah ...

* The game looks fun and promising, but it's completely held back by the marketing.

I'm sorry, I supported Physsynth, but can't support this.
Gigi

PS - I did not get past 2 mins of the video. But, as it says in my sig, success comes with trying things beyond your ability. And this thread is the part of success where you learn from mistakes. Now you can improve!

 

My two cents: Firstly, you currently have over $17,000 with two weeks left, so I don't think you're doing too badly. Secondly, someone suggested that there needs to be a 'hook', but I think the 'hook' is already provided by the nostalgia factor - 80's-style retro games often have a powerful pull for people in their late 30s and 40s who grew up with the Commodore 64 or Apple II. I'm one of those people, and I'll admit I sometimes get misty-eyed whenever I see anything that uses those simple tile-based landscapes of the early games in the "Ultima" series. Youtube is filled with retro game videos and comments from people saying that seeing the video took them back to their childhood or teen years. Those are likely to be your best supporters since they find the nostalgia irresistible and they've got money.
I never liked platform side-scrollers myself, but a lot of people did. If you want to advertise the project to them, there are websites devoted to C-64 nostalgia and frequented by balding, middle-aged men who are trying to relive their lost youth.

 

Even on Desktop thats a bit high , for some reason 10$ feels like a sweet* spot( on stream they have a section for games under 10$, your want to be in that section since then you wont have much AAA competition, 9.99$ pricing is good for indies on stream .)

THANKS MADA!

 

I'm assuming you meant sweet spot. Normally I don't correct spelling in forums, but if I made that mistake, I'd want to know.

 

I agree with many of the comments posted here..

While I'm not a fan of pixel/retro art, I really like the way the game is looking.

I did feel put off by the video pitch though.. it didn't do much for the game IMO. I'd change it and focus more on the game.
The latest update you did to the page really showcased some of the playability and that made me even more interested. Perhaps throw some of that onto the front page and remove the pitch video.. or simply redo it, with more focus on the game and gameplay.

The $15 price point is also a bit pricey.. it needs to come down a bit.

 

The graphics for this are amazing. There is no doubt that you are using every last resource to give this the look and feel to provide a great gaming experience.

But on your kickstarter page I'm wondering who you are actually targeting. Developers who understand the technical aspects of past games or consumers who out there who want to play good games. Your opening verbiage

"The Other Brothers is a game that shows what 8-bit games could have been, had they been written with todays technology! "

The statement is great for tech folks but what about consumers who actively view kickstarter projects who just want a certain genre of game while not understanding the technical details.

Take for instance Star Defense released by NGMOCO a few years back. The consumer would remember that it ran on his or her ipod 2nd gen device... but I don't think they would be interested that it ran on a fixed function pipeline (Opengl ES 1.x) and used characters with 100-300 triangles each ...etc ... etc ...

I would concentrate on game design to provide the ultimate gaming experience ... and explicitly communicate it.

Keep up the good work!! The updates look promising!

 

You guys still have time ! . At least your not using UDK- look at this bit of madness .

"Can Kickstarter or other crowd funding be used to fund games made with UDK? Is a license required?

Yes, crowd funding is perfectly acceptable with UDK games; however, a $99 commercial UDK license is required and all revenue earned through the crowd funding is subject to the standard UDK royalty."
- http://www.unrealengine.com/udk/licensing/licensing-faqs
Thats not profit , its REVENUE from your donors thats subject to the 25% UDK tax .

Keeping this in mind I plan to never donate to a UDK based game on kickstarter, i'm not cool with 25% of my donation going to make Epic richer .

 

While 25% is a bit much, why not make Epic richer? They provide a great engine.

 

Well personally, I find the twitter mentions obnoxious. Retweeting when someone says they backed the project every time gets really annoying to look at in my twitter feed. Its getting to the point where I consider unfollowing. Not trying to be mean, just being honest as to how I feel (and maybe how others feel).

 

I met some of the people from Epic and they are pretty nice down to earth people.

 

You can always follow me instead on @SquaredApe and I'll try and keep current with news. I don't tweet every backer though. And often I'm just plain rude. You can post silly things to me too.

 

Still $30,000 to go? Hm! The Other Brothers Great Team can surely develop 4 great games a year and one of those (if not 1st) will surely be great hit. But investors in Europe will never realize this. They look only to some banking, selling, speed money stuff. If You can keep up, bring The Other Brothers to stores and go on with rapid developing next game, but first check and consider monetization options. It's FREE time (I don't know it that will doomed indies but things are changing fast) and InApp purchases are almost must. Just check CSR Racing. Just shifting gears with great graphic (simplicity rule no1), I thought, but when my son with crying insisted on buying new cars it was clear to me why its Top Grossing?
Well, what's working, what not, is maybe just trials and errors.
The Other Brothers Great Team keep on!

Btw, Thomas tutorial of importing C4D landscape into Unity was revelation to my game development.

 

You guys need to get your game out there more, only 8 days left! still 29k to go! That would be 3.6k a day to meet your goal. People are donating just not enough fast enough. You need something that would get people talking about your game. Maybe there are arcade machines along the level and you can go up to them and play a mini game based on classics, and depending on your score you get powerups. Think of something.

Anyway even if you don't pull it off this time you no doubt learned a lot and you will be much better prepared next time around. So no need to stress out either. I think people work sloppy when they are stressed.

 

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...aigns_theres_such_a_thing_as_too_polished.php

 

Faith in humanity ... lost ...

 

My 2cents for what it's worth (about 3 cents now with inflation):

I pledged $25 out of solidarity with a fellow developer. But as a consumer, I would likely not have pledged - the reason has nothing to do with the amount of polish, or how cool your video is or anything like that. Simply, it's going to have an iphone/ipad version so I can pick it up for a few bucks. I think many people probably want to feel like they're getting a good deal, and I feel the same way. I back tons of projects, but I normally think of them as a "pre-purchase" discount of around 50%. I don't care about shirts, or "digital albums" or any of that other stuff. Just - How much is the game, does it suit my fancy, and what's the least I can post to get it? Plus, the game didn't seem to have the level of interactivity that I liked - I prefer most games to have some sort of RPG element, even if it's just leveling up every so often, or collecting various junk to solve problems.

 

The guy talking on the stream today was ultra boring. The game looks super awesome, and it's probably gonna be fun as heck but man, it's hard to not fall asleep with some of the presentation.

 

Survival of the fittest-No mercy; thepareport: how an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness http://bit.ly/RW67Tx

 

Good point! That's why PC and console project do much better on kickstarter. Anyway maybe The Other Brothers Great team try Gambitious. It's drived by people from industry.

http://gambitious.com/

 

Heh. But my faith in humanity was lost more because of that (see Gamasutra article in quote) :

I just wish the general public trend would at least try to scratch beneath the surface before making an absolute judgement based on appearance ... :/ Especially since they're backers. I don't know, they sound like funding a product is .... some sort of game.

edit : yes, sorry, derailing a bit here. But it stays in the scope of "why KS is not necessarly a revelator of a game's future success"

 

Exactly, like all thoose social, facebook thing.
And I don't know if our posts are any help for TOB. 7 days to go. Something radical might happen?

 

IMO having a failed kickstarter will be a good thing, it would show that an amazing game can be made without the support of the world.

 

They don't get the money but they can always try again later. If I were them I'd take a loan for the remaining amount and add it to the kick-starter so I get the 20K Don't know if that is illegal. It would just be a way to lower the goal to make it more do-able and they could pay back the loan from the kick-starter money. But I don't know if 20k meets their needs.

 

Today I found the name of this project in one news article (at one of the big gaming news sites in Finland) which had roughly translated title of "Rude behavior at Kickstarter: bribery, blackmail and intimidation". Similar articles with same type content were around too and most leading to pennys arcade as source info: http://penny-arcade.com/report/edit...ssment-the-dark-side-of-kickstarter-promotion

The localized article was a lot shorter but still gave bad impressions of the project to readers among with the other projects listed. In short this project recruiting spam army to flood every place they know. I haven't followed this thread a lot but remembered it from for tips and discussion so just wanted to people know that things can go wrong too if you try too much

 

Lol! You're smart!

 

I really think they should do it. What if they can't raise 26k the second time around, people may feel like the game is old news. What percentage of supporter will re-fund? 100%? doubtful. They should get that 24k loan rolling now, times running out.

 

We can't and will not cheat the system. It's quite likely the kickstarter will fail, but thats fine. What we learned from it was valuable

 

Poor article in my opinion and why do web designers insist on having white text on black backgrounds still? Its not good for your readers eyes, its not comfortable to read and can cause a 'Vienna blinds' effect for a few seconds afterwards when looking elsewhere.

Bribes for coverage
The bribery point is just silly. Its simply a different take on pretty much established publishing methods. Ever noticed how an article gets into a magazine about a company or product and you'll also have a full page advert for the same company or product? Sometimes on the opposite page! Yes its that simple buy advertising space and ask for a feature, no feature no advertising, no money for the magazine. This is because its a two-way street, most trade press need advertising and content to support to it, most companies need advertising and promotion. One cannot survive without the other.

Of course there are other alternatives such as 'swag' given to the trade press, taking interviewers out for paid expense dinner etc. Its really not a new thing at all.

There is no problem with 'buying' articles, the only problem is if you 'buy' asking for favourable/biased or outright fraudulent articles. I think the author is taking an unrealistic and unproductive moral high ground here.

Spamming sites for coverage
As for the 'spamming' of the 'The Other Brothers', really?

You're an editor or writer for a web magazine of course you'll going to get email campaigns targeted at you. Letter writing campaigns are a standard affair for all manor of things. You simply have to filter it out if it doesn't interest you. Obviously if you are getting the exact same email thousands of times that's more annoying, but its still not spam, not really, as if each comes from a unique user, then they are simply trying to show their support for something. Just because its organised does not make it spam. What if he'd received 800 emails from unique users and they hadn't been asked to write them? Would he still call that spam? Where does an active community wanting to support a product stop and spamming start?

Don’t speak out against a campaign, or we’ll get you
Welcome to the internet. This is nothing specific to kickstarter campaigns or even a new thing. Yes its nasty and if it gets serious you need to involve the police, but again unless it was orchestrated by the kickstarter creator its not really relevant. plus 'and some rather snide comments from everyone involved' so they got into a slanging match and things turned ugly - again hello? its the internet!



Neither the alleged 'bribery' or the 'spamming' are real issues here. The author concludes that these shouldn't be done, yet both are pretty much standard advertising practices. They may have been taken to extremes, but that's what people do to get noticed. Obviously developers should take more care to create more interesting campaigns, but what else are they meant to do? Only send a single email and hope that gets them noticed?

 

Didn't see this already posted - Chris Crawford writes about his failed Kickstarter campaign:

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/176458/Chris_Crawford_reflects_on_a_Kickstarter_gone_wrong.php

Here's an interesting quote:

This seems to back the idea that some/most people are using it to "preorder" games. There's also some interesting conversation going on at the bottom of the article, which don't agree either, all in all, might be worth reading.

 

I'm not sure at who are so aggressive but I have nothing to say about any of the articles as my point was that The Other Brothers name is kinda desecrated now. Everyone is copy pasting the same article from each other and stuff gets lost in translation. In the end there are thousands of readers that will/might remember the name related to these headlines if new kickstarter is relaunched with similar name and they might avoid it. The bribery or blackmailing has nothing to do with this project but it was just bad luck to get listed with these other ones.

 

...or they might check it out when they'd never normally heard of it. Got to stay positive. I'm not letting all this affect what is a fun game.

 

You thought I was being aggressive? Must be the internet, as I was actually just incredulous at the poor 'opinion piece' article, which was basically flawed in every way. Not sure why you thought it was aimed at yourself though, since I'm quoting, referring to and using the headings from the same article. Sorry if you thought it was directed at you.

As to 'The Other Brothers' being desecrated, I think you've miss-judged. Look at the replies to the article. Having read them after making my reply to you posting the article, i'd say 80-90% agree to various degrees with what i've written. Most on the bribery point, but a few on the other points. So I don't think this will harm TOB at all. In fact there is that old saying, 'no such thing as bad publicity', so it will be very interesting to see if there is a positive spike from this. Though sadly with only 25 hours to go, there is not much time for it to influence the project.

 

Whilst I think this is true to a degree, backers will still only do so if the game interests them, which is why I don't get what this article is meant to be about?
Its clear from the comments that the proposed game had very little to interest gamers, the kickstarter page itself is pretty poor with some hideous 'reward' sample graphics.

Chris mentions that he thought kickstarter was more of a charity. Well that's not something I've ever felt it was, not least because nearly most reward tiers offer something of value. If it was a 'charity' based service then it would just be a 'donations' button.

Besides it comes back to the first point above, even if it was a purely charity based initiative on kickstarter, I still don't see that his proposed 'simulation' would have garnered any more interest. Mostly because its just dull and uninspired, despite being ethically positive, but also it wouldn't have any effect. If you give to charity you want to 'affect' some cause or other, which a simulation (on its own) would achieve little.

 

It is not THAT hard to get a US$24k loan...


I know people who got a US$500k - US$2million in seed money by just pitching their company to investors.

 

It's against the rules of kickstarter to do this. We would never dream of doing it.

 

Interesting article.

I gotta agree with that point. I guess that does more harm than helps the project.

That gives me the impression that there is not enough interest in the game from the consumer side. And thus it may not the big success if done. A lot contributions come from fellow Unity developer, Notch donated $5000 and contributions from fellow Polycounters/CGhubbers because of Björn.

 

I just want to send out a big thank-you to all people who donated to our kickstarter. If you guys are still interested in the game, please head on over to http://www.tobgame.com/forum and we will be updating people there instead. Thanks again!

 

So, I assume TOB will make a last-minute comeback and finish the kickstarter </positive thinking>. But if not, have you thought about putting up a donation option (like paypal) or something on the forum or website (if donors still want to send you their cash)?

 

Good call Hippo, this is actually considered credit card fraud if the person who owns the bank account was to fund their own kickstarter . Which caries all sorts of legal and criminal consequences . Off course you could still call in a favor from your close friends and family .

 

Notch tweeted The Other Brothers

 

I think could had waited atleast a while, before start a new "kickstarter" (with same texts and all?),
to gather more support/hype/need first, or to add some different features to get others interested also..?

*edit: o, indiegogo campaign is donation based, no need to get the full amount

 

Saw the article...that's a low blow.
Hope you're able to keep moving.

 

I thought the penny arcade article was in poor taste and showed a huge lack of knowledge/sympathy towards indie devs. A shame really, especially somewhere that has the readership that they do.

They also skewed your guys' true words in trying to inspire your backers to bring attention to your project, that in my opinion was the low blow.

Best of luck though! I'm really hoping this project finds its feet as it looks absolutely fantastic.

 

When your doing crap like bribing journalist their can be no sympathy . Epic Skater's devs tried to BUY journalism with gifts . AND they got an article in Kotaku any way .
For TOB its a little different , since hundreds of people spamming a gaming blog could be a sign that , hey this is a cool game we should check out .

 

The $100 perk on the igg one is absolute bull S*** and a scam for money, linux is but a button away and the Ouya is actualy android and i doubt it will cost much to have it supported.

Another thing that I think is absolute S*** is:

Why say when you are clearly going to buy these anyway for your day jobs, or if you don't then you already own Unity 3 pro, I know you(Hippocoder) own Unity IOS pro, and i wouldn't put it past you to have Android pro.

Care to explain why it is going to cost you $20,000 ?!

I like the other brothers and the team behind it but having the indie go go so close to the end of the kickstarter is just a grab for money IMO and you should have waited.

 

Their doing indie go to make sure they get funding , I personally don't like Indie Go( for personal reasons I will not touch paypal for anything ) .

I really think the way to go would of been to do anouther kickstarter( maybe wait a bit like Tyler is saying ) but set a lower goal, like 15k .

 

@TylerPerry
$20000 = 4 (people) x ( $1500 (Pro) + $1500 (iOS) + $1500 (Android) + $500 (Team) )

Of course this includes that you a) don't get a volume discount and b) don't use/own a single licence already.

 

I know, but they do own licenses already at least hippo and i'm sure Thomas would.

 

They also need just one iOS license and one Android licence to build for these devices, right?