Campaign Postmortem
about 3 years ago – Mon, Apr 17, 2023 at 05:01:52 PM

Two weeks out from the campaign, we've been able to catch our breath a bit. Time for a postmortem on the campaign!

Overall Trends

Let's collect some numbers! The project ran for 31 days, from March 1 to 31st, and raised a total of $195,585 from 4762 backers. There was $1905 in dropped pledges (1%) and a payment processing fee of $6753 (3.5%). The average pledge was $41.07; a week before the end of the campaign it was closer to $50, but the surge of $20 backers at the end brought it down.

It followed the standard pattern of having a spike at the start and end of the campaign. The oft-quoted rule of thumb is about third of funding comes in during the first 48 hours, middle period, and the final 48 hours. However, we saw something closer to a 25–50–25% split.  

This weighting towards the middle plateau was is in large part due to starting the ad campaign midway through the campaign. I appreciate being able to clearly see its effects in the relative quiet of the middle period (more on that below).

I'm curious about what caused the gradual increase in daily revenue between the 22nd and 28th; I can anecdotally relate that as we closed in on the final $150k stretch goal, people got super excited about it and it felt like there was more grassroot sharing going on, but I don't know if that can explain such a sustained change.

In doing pre-launch research on other recent campaigns, I remember noticing that big end spikes actually seemed relatively rare; it was more common that there'd be a more-gradual 2-3x pickup in pledges the last week or so. I haven't heard this talked about or named, but it would be interesting to do a more comprehensive search and see if it's a real pattern and what the dynamics driving it might be. Something for next time.

An interesting note is that although the spike in backer count was comparable between the first and last 48 hours, the former's funding spike was about 2/3 of the latter. I would attribute this to the fact that the high-end rewards had all been claimed at that point, but it's also possible that late backers are more likely to pick lower tiers.

Rewards

The $20 base Lancer tier for just the game was the most popular, as expected. However the Veteran tier actually raised slightly more funds despite being 2/3 as popular.

The lesson here for folks running their own campaigns: do not neglect your $100+ tiers! (although try hard to keep the cost of fulfilling them as low as possible!) There's a reason you see campaigns with a huge laundry list of deluxe xtreme VIP rewards; funds raised were about 50:50 between under and over that ~$100 slot. Weirdly, I saw that exact same pattern during my last campaign despite it having been an order of magnitude smaller.

Traffic sources

I always wish I could see a timelapse of how these proportions change over the course of the campaign, but I only remembered to take a few scattered snapshots. Next time I'll try to do a daily download.

Once again, I neglected to utilize referral codes and have a big ol' slice of "Direct" links where we don't know where the person came from. I particularly wish I'd used them for the PilotNET Discord announcements; there are many grassroots servers that mirror that channel, and we have no way of measuring how many of those direct links are attributable to those. As those announcements went out at the start and in the last 48 hours, how much they drove those spikes is lost among the larger signal.

I'm always suspicious of the graph that Kickstarter provides for referrals (below) because it clumps the launch and final-48-hour reminder emails in with the traffic it drives itself through the site itself; how much of that is value coming from Kickstarter-the-platform vs how much of it could be replicated by sending those emails yourself?

By digging through the 100+ referral codes and grouping them into the above categories, we have an answer: of the "pledged via Kickstarter" reported here, about 20% is from reminder emails, 15% is from (specific?) searches for Lancer Tactics, and the remaining 65% is the direct value-add from Kickstarter pushing the campaign. 

Advertising

We ended up with an overall ROAS of 2.57; we spent $9679 (plus a $3735 commission to Backerkit) and trackably-raised $24,903 from 669 backers (about 13% of the total values); As described in the advertisement midmortem, that $24k revenue will chewed down to a "real" profit for the project of $8867. Roughly 2/3s of that profit came from the first three days of ads, including a one-off claiming of the Xiaoli tier, and the rest trickled in over the rest of the campaign. 

An extra $9k is, like, nice, but if that's all it was it would not have been worth the amount I've stressed out about this whole process. However, this is where that mysterious untracked increase in non-ad revenue comes in. How many more people backed the project via another route because they'd previously seen an ad? How many people didn't click the ad but went and searched for it elsewhere? How many people forwarded it to a friend who found it by some other means?

If we had started the ad campaign along with the start of the campaign it would have been impossible to separate it out from the rest of the signal (well, besides gratuitous referral tag usage), but we luckily accidentally performed the perfect experiment by starting it in the middle where there were no other major identifiable influxes of traffic. You can clearly see a big red hill build up along with the ad campaign (days 14-18) before returning to a resting pre-ad state (compare days 19–22 with days 6–11).

The best takeaway lesson I might hazard for this is "the ghost hill from advertisements will show up for the first few days, but don't depend on it to stick around." Perhaps calculate ROAS separately for the first few days and the steady long-burn; they seem to operate under different dynamics.

Finally, something I only learned/realized a week before the project was over is that the daily ROAS is not an independent variable; you have some amount of control to dial it up or down by how much money you put in! If your ROAS is super high, the professional wisdom is that you should turn your spending up because you haven't reached the edges of your audience yet. Increasing your adspend will make your ROAS eventually go down due to diminishing returns — but returns are returns.

(A reminder that the closer you get to your ROAS, the more it becomes an engine to funnel backer money into facebook's maw; so there are real ethical costs of chasing those pennies.)

For all you neuroscientists in the house, this means that the process is basically a voltage clamp! Adspend is injected current, ROAS is neuron membrane potential — whereas a current clamp would be having a budget of a flat X dollars every day.

Next Steps

Another long one, thanks for reading! I feel like this was more of an statsdump than a careful dissection of the implications, but I've already spent too much time on this so this is what we got. Data for posterity, or something.

The Kickstarter funds hit the bank account this morning (😳) so we should be sending out backer surveys sometime this week/end. Mark and I are also working on sketching out a production schedule that we'll share when it's ready, but I'm trying to slow down to a marathon pace so am not going to give myself a public deadline for that yet.

🌺 Olive

Home stretch // closing stream
about 3 years ago – Fri, Mar 31, 2023 at 01:00:32 PM

me: alright, we've passed all the stretch goals (even the impossible one), we've cleared the adspend hurdle, I... I think we're golden?

my brain: great! what's next to be worried about?

me: no really, I think we're just good. we're even growing a healthy buffer for things being more expensive than we expected. we don't have to be worried about something all the time

my brain: ...

my brain: but what about-

me: NO LET US HAVE THIS. WE'RE GONNA CELEBRATE AN UNAMBIGUOUSLY SUCCESSFUL CAMPAIGN TONIGHT ON STREAM AND COUNTDOWN THE END. 7-9PM PST, STARTING ABOUT SIX HOURS FROM NOW, TWITCH.TV/WICKWORKS. THANK U SEE YOU THERE. UNLESS IT'S LIKE 3AM BC YOU'RE IN EUROPE. OOPS.

(it'll be an AMA format so if you're curious about the gameplan or other stuff about the campaign, you'll be able to submit questions during the stream. I am hoping it'll be fairly chill. We'll probably talk about Lancer, play the game a little, crack open Godot and show how the engine works, etc)

Actual project update: Sometime in the coming days, I'll write up a postmortem of the campaign + a rough sketch of what the next 2-3 years will likely look like. We'll also be sending out the backer survey for addresses, callsigns, etc in a few weeks via Backerkit. You'll be able to update your answers and addresses at any point between then and reward shipment.

Olive  🌺

Final stretch goal reached + bonus SSC sticker!
about 3 years ago – Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 04:11:21 PM

$150,000, y'all!!

We're gonna do it! This is enough for us to spend a year of full-time dev working on a 100% content port. That's all the mech licenses, npcs, and talents from the core book (plus any pick-me-ups like how the Kobold is already mostly done).

I want to say "we never expected this", but I think I've said it enough times that at this point I just need to get better at expecting things. 🙃 🎷

We're still ironing out the details about the timing of this full-time year — we might do it all at once after we finish the rest of the base and stretch goals, or we might distribute it throughout. And as previously described, it's a "take our best shot" kind of deal; we will likely have to tweak some mechanics to make them fit into a video game, and we're not gonna stay chained to this forever in order to get every single optional NPC trait.

What's Next?

These last 48 hours will help rebuild our buffer that already got eaten up by ad-spend. We'd be fine if it ended today, but I'll breathe much easier if we end up somewhere in the $160–170k range.

Other than that "help soothe Olive's anxieties" range, this was the final stretch goal for this campaign. Mod support and VTT capabilities via local multiplayer are on our unofficial wishlist, so we'll pick them up if they end up being relatively easy. We're just not confident enough to put ourselves on the hook for them for this initial chunk of work.

Finally, I'm planning on hosting a livestream/ask-me-anything for the campaign's close. It'll be at twitch.tv/wickworks this Friday the 31st from about 7–9pm Pacific. We'll hang out + chat, play the game some, maybe poke around in Godot, and do a final countdown at 9pm.

(You can see what that is in your time zone by looking at the schedule here. Sorry that's so late for our East Coast and European friends! I wasn't thinking of this when I set the campaign end to 9pm PST.)

Stickers_final_final (3).png

Turns out that I couldn't handle having stickers for only three of the four core manufacturers, so here's a little last-minute surprise bonus entry: SSC's Moth Kaleidoscope. This design may be a biiiit more subject to change than the others (it's weirdly the only one without some kind of text), but we are officially Out Of Time for more announcements so this is what we got! Some cybernetic moth motifs and a DNA ring! Heck yeah!

This means each sticker set for Veteran tiers and above will have a total of five stickers: one for each of the four manufacturers + our good friend trans dabbo gobbo.

Thank you, everyone. We're gonna make something real cool.

Week three // IPSN sticker // Dawnline Shore worldbuilding // Play Anthropocene interview
about 3 years ago – Wed, Mar 22, 2023 at 02:09:56 PM

IPS-NORTHSTAR STICKER

The last (?) sticker design! It's based on the guidestone from Homeworld; a spiral galaxy that evokes a whirlpool/ocean with nautical map on top. The logo is positioned at space-north to reinforce the "Northstar" theme, and the font (Goldman) has a passing similarity to the "worm" NASA logo (look at the S). I originally was thinking the whole thing could represent blinkgates before I realized that the locations of Lancer are entirely contained in the Orion arm. Since we can't have a galaxy-spanning subway map, I guess I gotta put a "for navigational and/or informational purposes only" disclaimer on it like it's in the homeopathy section of a supermarket.

The story in my head about this one is that some designer at IPS-N was tasked with mapping their logo onto the heavens by making a star chart that emphasizes relationships between stars to mimic the shape of the IPS-N compass. It also undertakes subtle cultural warfare by placing Cradle at the center of the galaxy by putting everything in relation to it; the Karrakin Trade Barony does not approve.

I'm super happy with how this one has turned out, though it took several times longer to get right than the previous stickers. Here's what the design file ended up looking like:

Dawnline Shore & worldbuilding

Speaking of maps, I've been meaning to share this one for a while. While trying to figure out the setting for Lancer Tactics, I tried to pull together as much info on the Dawnline Shore as I could to figure out if there was space anywhere to put a video game. Most of the specific bits of lore come from the Battlegroup core book.

Each planet has several names listed for what the various factions call it. DS5, DS6, and DS10 are all blank slates; this name-chart is the only place they're given any kind of identity. DS5 jumped out at us because of the through-line of its three names — Verdevilla, Emerald Harbor, and Viridian. It posed the question: what about this place made everybody agree that it was, indeed, very green?  

The easy answer is that it's some sort of lush plant-heavy paradise, but my geologist worldbuilding collaborator (Enyo) had the idea the color coming from heavy-metal chromite sands. However, the tileset we've been using is a more grassy-hills-and-medieval-walls theme. How to reconcile that?

We'd recently read the Sanjak Revolution flashpoint in the The Karrakin Trade Baronies supplement, so the answer of terraforming and the injustice of borders were fresh in our minds — what if we did something like that? We have these stone walls as a symbol, so a group called the Sappers that fights to undermine those walls is good thematically. We also realized that the name of Sappers could have originally referred to microbiotic "rock sappers" that slowly converted the chromite sands into life support — an idea almost wholly lifted from the story of how indigenous people terraformed the infertile soil of the Amazon rainforest into rich dark terra preta over hundreds of years. The massive and rapid slash-and-burn terraforming being undertaken by the Karrakins is literally just modeled on industrial irresponsibly-applied slash-and-burn techniques. 

We essentially backfilled the setting based on the questions posed by these two data points: the green-themed names and the medieval-themed tileset with stone walls! 

Funding Update

March is flying by. We have nine days left. How are we doing?

We're sitting just under $120. After the initial rush from the ads, the rate of pledges has more-or-less leveled out to pre-ad levels with ROAS has dropping to just 3.0 (we tried adding some new ads, but there was a hiccup as fb finally took issue with us encouraging people to do crime 😬). Current ad-spend is $5k before fees.

Reaching $150k by the end is still possible but dicey! I think it will almost entirely depend at this point on how large the final 48hr spike is; the oft-quoted rule of thumb is about a third of the project total in the final week, but browsing Kicktraq, it looks like the patterns nowadays is a big jump at the start and just a steady climb throughout with a slightly steeper slope for the last few days. Backerkit is still projecting $170, but my own math puts us closer to $145k unless there's another big surprise. As discussed in the ads midmortem, just barely bumping over $150 is actually not a great situation for us if we have a high ad-spend so we're going to continue keeping a close eye on that. 

"Project we Love" status!

Oh, also, I got this lovely message yesterday! ngl I'm pretty proud to be batting 3 for 3 for this particular flavor of external validation for all of my campaigns so far. Really sweet of them!

Play Anthropocene interview

I did an interview with Play Anthropocene and took the opportunity to soapbox about our political aims with the game & why games are bad at being anything other than a game (based on my previous experience making science games). Quotes that I think are particularly punchy (if technically arguable):

"We've kept the focus about the consequences local to create a sharp visual contrast; a wall with grassy hills on one side and industrial slaglands on the other. Oil barons thrive on muddling the issue; they make it seem complicated and economic. We're leaning into the clearly contrasting imagery to tell people: no, it IS that simple. The ultra-rich have chosen to burn the world from inside their walled gardens; they have chosen to choke the air and kill us."

and:

"The stories of justice we're planning to tell will be stories of resistance to and survival within this system. It's tempting to show the evil empire toppled and the wrongs righted, but the effect this has on  an audience is one of pacification. Think instead of the discomfort of an unhappy ending and how it stays with you long after you leave the theatre. We seek to magnetize, to activate, to show that despite the persistence of injustice victories can be fought for and won (sometimes just survival and helping others get out alive is what winning looks like).

We believe that these local victories can add up to change the global status quo, but that's a story best told over the bones of empire."

This comes with the disclaimer that we barely have any narrative space in the game so our reach here is super limited. But I think it's good to know where you're standing when you're making something, no matter how small. Read the full interview here! 

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  🌺