Advertisement midmortem
about 3 years ago – Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 11:37:26 AM

Let's talk about ads!

As mentioned previously, I've never participated in an ad campaign before so this is an experiment for me — and my scientist training has taught me to digest experiments by writing and sharing, so here we are! I hope to pull back the curtain some on how your data is being used across platforms & maybe come to better understand the money engine that powers most of the internet.

This is a hunky update, so feel free to skip to the discussion at the end to see us agonize over the morality of participating in society.

The data so far

We've been running ads on Facebook and Instagram since Monday the 13th. The campaign was in its middle plateau phase at about $80k and was averaging ~$1k in pledges per day. There's always a bump in the final 24 hrs, but even accounting for that I think we would have only crested $100k by the end of the campaign; we've already far outstripped the capacity of my personal connections and I don't have any kind of press contacts planned (because I have an incredible amount of social anxiety about cold-calling strangers and am already whelmed by managing this campaign).

Since starting the ads, we've seen about $2k in pledges per day from directly from ads (tracked from the URL that folks use to reach the campaign). The rate of non-ad pledges has also increased from $1k/day to about $3k/day (Kickstarter itself pushing it more due to the increase of traffic? I haven't been able to track down the source of these). These have gotten us to a current project total of $110k, compared to the ~$89k where we would probably be without running ads. The backer who claimed the Xiaoli homebrew reward also came to the project via ads; it's unlikely that tier would be filled if not for this ad campaign.

This sounds great! But it carries with it a hidden cost: participating in ads means the funding level of the campaign no longer 1:1 represents the the money we'll have available to spend on the project. We originally set each goal to the actual cost of implementing that feature, but now every pledge that comes in through advertising has a chunk shaved off — it's almost halved!

For example, this first week of ads has generated about $13k — but we will need to pay for the ads that got us to that point + Backerkit's 15% commission. With a time-of-writing campaign total of about $109k, the post-payback total is $103k and that gap will only widen the longer we do ads. 

And that's before the cost of fulfilling $13k more's worth of pledges; it means we'll need more stickers, coins, postage, etc. Fortunately we did a good job picking rewards and those are flat costs so we're not in danger of breaking the bank, but it's worth remembering.

Devil's wager (facebook is the devil in this metaphor)

So those are our choices as I currently see them:

• we could end our ads and happily coast along to the end of campaign with what we have, or 
• participate in ads that will almost certainly bring us to the stretch goal of $150k — but if we don't end up overshooting it by enough we'll end up with the obligation of a 100% port without the full $150k to pull it off. Running ads brings our "true" final stretch goal from $150k up to about $170k!

Backerkit's current projections put us at about $160k ± $30k by the end, so falling in that awkward window is likely. We'd be able to find a way to make it work and the project would not be in jeopardy, but it's not ideal — we would have to dip into our personal savings in the hope that later sales of the game would make it back up.

Mark and I discussed this and, for now, have decided to continue with the ads for as long as they maintain a good ROAS. Honestly, we just really want to take a crack at 100% port* to get the game into a more complete state. We'll both be able to absorb the risk if that's what it comes to. So — here's hoping! The game is on! We might actually make it to that final stretch goal!

*or a year of full-time work on it, whichever comes first

Targeting, or, Why Is Olive Asking Me To Fill Out A Survey?

Here's where we get into the parts I still don't understand as well; Backerkit has been handling all of the audience-building stuff, and bless them because I've tried using that interface before and it's gnarly. We used the backers from my previous campaigns and the people who signed up to be notified for the project launch to... somehow build out the audience on Facebook to show the ads to?

Whatever they did, it's working. We've gotten nearly twice the click-through rate as industry average, although it's fallen off after the initial splash. I'm hesitant to try and interpret this as Backerkit has advised me that these are highly context-dependent and project-specific, but it's generally a good sign and means that the money we're spending is more efficient than usual. 

As an added bonus, the visibly-gay ads being well-targeted has a protective effect in that they're less likely to be served to people looking to start trouble; moderating the comments was rough for the first few days (I learned some new transphobic dog whistles, cool cool cool) but it wasn't as bad as it could have been and I have a better handle on it now.

Many of you have gotten a message from me about a survey about how you found the campaign; this helps us know what's working (so we don't shovel money into fb's maw for no reason) and I think helps us not serve ads to people who want to make "jokes" about people like me being dead. Though I want to stress you're under no obligation to fill them out if you don't want to share that information! It's helpful info, not essential.

As you can see, the click-throughs are dropping off fast so we're probably going to wind down this first batch of ads as we figure out when the next step to take is going to be — either a new batch or wait until near the end of the campaign when we can pull out that "final 48 hours!" card. If you're curious, here's a list of the 7 ads and their stats. Trans Balor has predictably caused the most engagement, but note that the ads that demonstrate the tactical nature of the game (2, 5, 6) have the most efficient conversion percentages.

Discussion

Ads are an engine to turn money into more money! It suddenly makes sense how a company like Google can run on ad revenue; as long as an advertiser stays comfortably above their minimum ROAS, any magnitude of money spent is basically free because you make more than that in return! I can so clearly see the path of how someone could scale up from here and end up throwing a quarter million to these tech companies without batting an eye. ROAS is better when you know more about your users, so this engine is incentivized to do all of the privacy-invasive stuff we've heard about.

Let's take a second to step back. I'm goddamn considering paying facebook $13,000 — an amount of money comparable to my last entire campaign — because that's what the numbers on a spreadsheet come out to! It feels real bad to have such a large percentage of backer funds get diverted into a platform that helps overthrow democracies!

Is it better to turn your back on this advertising monster because you don't believe in its values? Or is this just what participation in society/this industry looks like? I've been asked a handful of times — by sealions, granted — what being gay has to do with doing giant robot crimes. My canned answer is that we want to make a game that's "culturally queer, with those values shining through wherever possible." Does that begin with saying no to participating in this kind of system?  Is it hypocritical to pay facebook to put up a trans flag? There's gonna be some ad there — why not have it be pride instead of some war game that doesn't concern itself with all this? This is the battlefield we're on, let's take up space! // This is the trap they set, capitalism transmutes all criticism to itself into more fuel for its own fire.

Mark and I discussed it, and our answer to this dissonance is that we gotta pick our battles. We have limited space and resources. Our core goals are to make development a good experience for all contributors (pay fairly and promptly as possible, fit work schedules around our outside-work lives), to make a mechanically and visually polished game, and to infuse what narrative space we have available with all the queerness and anticolonialism we can muster. Trying to retain some kind of moral purity around the advertising of this initial fundraiser is related to, but not essential, to those goals. The ends don't justify any means, but they can outweigh some on a case-by-case basis. We just gotta trust ourselves to make art that's worth it. (we also don't judge other people for participating in ads or not; I trust others to make their own calls on this front)

Thank you again to Backerkit; they've been very helpful in guiding us through this process, have listened to my concerns, are down for us to share all these stats, and have been proactive about scaling ad-spend as makes sense for the success of the overall project. Personally, they also helped me narrowly avoid getting phished due to me being too exhausted from moderating the fb comments to notice the trap.

Whew. Thanks for reading, thanks for supporting. I may missed or gotten some things wrong because I'm still pretty new to this, but I hope it was an interesting dive.

Olive  🌺

Week two // H0RUS glow-up // Xiaoli tier // MEATPUNKS recc
about 3 years ago – Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 12:21:29 PM

Week two hullabaloo 

We're halfway through the duration of the campaign and passed the $100k mark last night. Yikes!

The keen-eyed among you may notice that the chart has had a bit of a different behavior for the last few days. This is almost entirely due to the launch of the ad campaign that Backerkit has helped us put together for Facebook and Instagram. I was hoping to be able to dive into the details for this update like I did for calculating ROAS, but I think it'll best be broken out into its own post and after we've had a little more time to sit with the data that's coming in.

Glow-in-the-dark stickers!

On a bit of a lark, I noticed that Sticker Ninja offered this as an option and they had great reviews, so I figured why not! Let's have some fun!

I thought this would be a late-campaign surprise, but they got the proofs back to me super quickly and they're just too cool to sit on. The glow-in-the-dark material requires changing the lime-green logo to white (or near-white) but I think it still works. So yeah! The H0RUS stickers are now gonna be glow-in-the-dark as a freebie. Cool bonus!

Xiaoli tier — Homebrew mech incoming!

It's been zipped up! Zounds!

We've zeroed in on this zone much faster than I expected. The details are still under ziplock and key, but I can zap you this zoo of a hint about what kind of zesty mech we might be seeing that's home-grown on Verdevilla.

Strongly recommend: MEATPUNKS

The TTRPG for Extreme Meatpunks Forever released earlier this week! It's a game that pulls no punches, is Powered By The Apocalypse (both mechanically and, like, literally narratively), the meat mechs are these gross and beautiful entities literally made of blood and belief (one of the available weapons are "Screaming Mount Vents"), and its tagline is Be Gay. Pilot Mechs. Kill Nazis. — so um yeah I figured that there'd be some overlap here in what y'all are into. The art and layout is gorgeous, lore is frighteningly well-thought-out, and just reading through the rulebook will leave you Changed.

Check it out at sinisterbeard.itch.io/meatpunks. There are also communities copies available for marginalized communities.

Sticker #3 — (Reactor) Stress is a resource
about 3 years ago – Sun, Mar 12, 2023 at 09:13:37 AM

Happy daylight savings, everyone! It is the day that we are reminded that time is a social construct, an illusion carried forward by the momentum of the systems we have created. Truly a blessed day, for without it we would forget that we ourselves wrought this apparent foundation of the universe.

And if time is something we created, it's something we can bend. Push your mech's reactor to the 1d6+4 heat limit and you'll find that you can do more with the time that you have (one quick action's worth, to be precise) (how was that for a transition from the intro paragraph to the topic at hand).

Today we have the third sticker for Veteran tier and up: REACTOR STRESS IS A RESOURCE.

Like daylight savings time, this is a common refrain* to help remind us that if you end a mission with anything more than a single point of reactor stress remaining, you've basically left action economy on the table.

* well, technically, "stress is a resource" is the actual saying†, but out of context that sounds like some kind of weird hustle culture thing and we don't want that.

† after doing a search, it looks like "reactor stress is a renewable resource" was actually its first recorded form, so we've kind of come full circle here.

This design came from me playing around with the idea that we had a H0RUS sticker, what if we had one for the other manufacturers? I knew I wanted to do this phrase, and Harrison Armory seemed like the best match for it — but how to fit both the reactor symbol and the HA logo on the same design? Playing around with layouts, when I put four reactors in the corners it tickled a faint design memory. Where had I seen something like this before?

After some miraculous googling, I found it: the Indian-head test pattern used to calibrate old television sets. It's a cool bit of technology, with all the lines an numbers set up to reveal where your errors were if your set was incorrectly processing high- or low-frequency signals. It also weirdly includes a Native American wearing a headdress? Dunno what to say about that besides it sounds like part of the same sort of gross cultural impulse that used that icon as a football mascot. That shit's everywhere.

I couldn't think of any way to tie in the little numbers to something meaningful in Lancer gameplay or lore so for now they're just little numerical greebles. If you can think of some kind of Easter egg to throw in there, I'm all ears.

Finally, if you work in an honest-to-god nuclear reactor and have the freedom to put stickers on things in there, PLEASE let me know and I'll send you a pack of these for free as long as you post some pictures of having done so. This offer does not expire (until I run out, I guess). EDIT: on second thought, is it legal to post pictures from inside reactors? I don't think so. Please don't break any laws. I'll take your word for it.

Olive

One week in // add-ons // ad-ventures // Palisade recc
about 3 years ago – Wed, Mar 08, 2023 at 07:18:27 AM

Halfway there

Current mood: This is so much work! Why am I working so hard! We'll either get to the final stretch goal or we won't, either way is great! I've promised Mark that I'll delegate more; that's what teams are for. Thanks, Mark.

We're sitting pretty at a whopping 385% — over halfway to the final stretch goal of $150k, with three weeks to go. Stellar. ✨

Coins as addons

So: we've backed ourselves into a bit of a corner. We've been trying to figure out how to offer coins as add-ons, but have been stymied by where we set the price points for the original tiers. If we set the cost any lower than $54, then it obsoletes Elite because it's strictly cheaper to choose Veteran and grab the coin as an addon. But if we set the cost any higher than $50, then it becomes clunky to add more coins to a Squad. It's like a $4 anti-window.

So we've just made it available at $50 to prioritize convenience over making the numbers line up perfectly. If you wanna optimize and save yourself that $4, well, I was looking for ways to make the coin more affordable so let's call it an opt-in small discount if you need it.

We also considered coming up with more coins designs (one for each manufacturer?), but then we remembered that our main job at this point is to make sure the scope of this campaign doesn't bloat and become undeliverable. As such, we've shuttered adding any more options beyond this coin-addon for now.

Backerkit & advertising

We've just started working with Backerkit to help do pledge management + advertising. I personally have never done, like, an Advertising Campaign, so we're doing this as an exploratory experience to see what it entails and how it goes. The folks at Backerkit been very helpful and communicative in bringing me up to speed in their system (I attended a conference they put on in 2018, very chill).

The biggest thing I've learned so far is that all the fancy click-through cohort pipeline audience retention statistics can come down to one number: for every dollar of advertising you put in, how many dollars do you get out? ("return on advertisement spending", or ROAS, calculated by avg pledge / avg margin)

It needs to be higher than you might think for it to be worth the effort; that dollar you put in needs to make itself back and then also cover all the costs and obligations that come with someone giving you money. The cost of the thing you need to give them, the shipping, the government wanting a slice of the fact that someone gave you some money... to actually break even, you'll probably need a ROAS of more than 2.0 (again, "for every dollar you spend, you get two dollars in return") or way more when dealing with hefty non-digital items. It's different for every project, but here's the calculation I did for this campaign for the minimum ROAS we'd need for spending money on ads to be worth it.

You do small runs of your ads to experimentally determine out what your ROAS actually is going to end up being. If you're above the minimum you calculated, you're golden. If you're not, well, good thing you tested.

There's also two different kinds of cost that I ran into: costs that are flat ("it costs $4 to ship this product") and costs that scale with revenue ("the government takes 20% of whatever you charge"). Interestingly, for expensive/high-margin items like the coin, flat costs become almost inconsequential while revenue-scaling ones grow proportionally; it's easy to spring for some deluxe option that costs a few more dollars per unit, but the tax rate stays proportionally significant.

...and as I write this, I come to the realization that labor costs are in the "flat" category — it'll cost the same to package something up no matter how much it's being sold for. Is this how the math works out at scale? With regard to, say, corporations who claim they can't afford to pay their workers more? Makes you think.

Anyway, hope that was interesting to folks. Here are some drafts of potential fb/insta ads I made as a novice ad-maker, I don't know if we'll end up using them!

Strongly recommend: PALISADE

Finally, Friends at the Table is an actual play podcast that has been foundational in how I understand worldbuilding, the mecha genre, and the dynamics of empire. Tomorrow they are starting PALISADE, their newest season. It's on a world beset by colonializing imperial powers and features the struggle of its inhabitants to survive that process — obviously, a huge inspiration for Viridian. If you're hungry for this kind of story, you can't do better than giving them a listen.

Check it out 8pm EST Thursday March 9  at twitch.tv/friendsatthetable or their rss feed at friendsatthetable.net. It's going to be a great time, I'm certain.

I hope you're having a good week!  🌺 Olive

Trans gobbo sticker reveal + more Drink Deep coins available!
about 3 years ago – Sat, Mar 04, 2023 at 10:42:07 AM

Good morning! (it was morning when I started writing this) Today we have the first of the three unannounced stickers and some reward limit increases!

The second sticker: everyone's favorite gremlin 

This iconic gremlin started as a pride month joke in the PilotNET discord server. JennyWasHere#3141, who in 2019 made this edit of Tom Bloom's original goblin art, says:

"Context, i think at the time i was making a lot of pride flag edits I made the scrolling pride flag lancaster server icon, and i made several other mechs with flags and the goblin + trans flag + dab was just, peak of that kind of content, so i gave it a shot, and its been our banner ever since"

It's common for a new face to tentatively show up (Lancer is a wargame that deals with some serious themes, it's easy to imagine a community that leans in a nasty direction) and end up sticking around with a note that the banner helped set them at ease. Additionally, as an unexpected side-effect, it has become weirdly good scarecrow for chuds; every so often someone lands in the server and throws a fit about it. Like, come on, it's not here to exclude anyone, it would be so easy to be chill and co-exist. C'est la vie.

This 4.5 x 2.5 inch beauty joins the H0RUS logo in the sticker pack at the Veteran tier and above. Two more stickers remain TBA!

Khajiit has coin, if you have warez

I'm in the process of signing up with BackerKit, which will allow us to handle the logistics of increased shipping quantities. As such, I have increased the tier limits of Elite from 140 -> 360 and Squad from 40 -> 120, once again making the DRINK DEEP AND DESCEND coin available. I still haven't quite worked out how to offer the coin as an individual add-on like some folks have asked about, but I'm working on it and it's a definite possibility.

Here's what that looks like, again, if you need a reminder.

Thank you again to Henry Werrell for taking the initiative to make this rendering! 3D stuff is not my wheelhouse so I wouldn't have thought to do so.

(Y'know, when we were talking about the possibility of doing this coin as a reward, the conversation went something like "well, I don't know, they're not as easy to create as stickers and will make shipping way harder. But I personally think it's super cool and selfishly want one for myself, so let's chalk it up as Olive's One Indulgence and do a small run as thank-yous to whoever happens to pledge that high.")

More Spacer pilot portrait slots!

After checking in with Martina, we've also increased the slots of the Spacer tier from 10 to 20. See your OC's face rendered in beautiful pixels! Check out Martina's art at tinyartjar.studio and follow her on twitter at @TinyArtJar.

That's all for now.

We're doing great. As expected, things have settled down after the first few days and I've been able to start working at more sustainable pace. The general rule-of-thumb is that Kickstarter campaigns get 1/3 of their funding in the first few days, 1/3 over the long middle period, and 1/3 near the end. It's not a rule and exceptions are common, but by that point of comparison we are doing very, very well.

I hope everyone has a good weekend!

🌺 Olive