DreadBall Xtreme Kickstarter Ends With A Backslide

Mantic Games 6th Kickstarter, and the second for DreadBall, ended tonight with a take of US$575,755,-. Well over half a Million dollars. That, clearly, isn’t bad (and still one of the top 100 Kickstarters of all times). Given the over US$ 250,000,- launch day, it was still perhaps below expectations / predictions, and less than the first DreadBall Kickstarter.

Curiously enough, the total amount pledged for DreadBall Xtreme did a fair bid of backwards sliding in the final hour.

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#1 – DreadBall & DreadBall Xtreme on Kicktraq

The Kicktraq history of the original DreadBall Kickstarter

The same chart for DreadBall Xtreme

It is obvious that the most money and dynamic in the DreadBall Xtreme Kickstarter was sitting at the front, with a record opening of over 1/4 Million Dollars. It went on a far more leisurely pace ever after.

Considering the “common” complaint of “established companies shouldn’t use Kickstarter”, I increasingly feel this may well be a (nearly) self-correcting problem.

The more “established” a company becomes, the better the pre-campaign advertising of a Kickstarter is, the more capable of a company is on mobilizing its fans and customers, the less important the “running time” of the Kickstarter-campaign itself becomes. The overall shape and trend of “sales” appears to be fast approaching that of an old fashioned pre-order: that is, customers “in the know”, know it on day one. The later outreach is increasingly marginal.

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#2 – The Curious 5K Drop

The other curiosity of this campaign was an odd limp finish, which saw the campaign lose over US$ 5.000,- in the last hours.

There are (at least) three things that go some ways to explain this (I think).

• Early Birds & Clone Accounts - Mantic Games offered a variety of limited, discounted “early bird” pledge levels, enticing people to jump in early. Wily Kickstarter-backers these days, more often than not, apparently have multiple accounts to “reserve” themselves these early birds at different levels. It’s an odd bluff-double-bluff game of Kickstarter-creators trying to get people in early, and people in turn gaming the early birds. It’s probably less headaches all around to avoid Early Birds in Kickstarter campaigns all together.

• Survey Options - “Veterans” of Mantic Kickstarter campaigns know that Mantic will allow them to add more stuff in the surveys following the Kickstarter. In a very generous move, Mantic Games’ last Kickstarter update before the end announced that they would count all the money taken through these surveys (outside Kickstarter) to see if not-yet-achieved Stretch-Goals would be unlocked. It was a great gesture, but it might have led a fair number of people to “push back” their pledge to the surveys.

•  Frenzy - Mantic put a lot of effort into convincing people to pick up the “all-included” US$ 385,- pledge level, which is a hell of a sticker-price for a board game. I think it worked reasonably well. However, perhaps inevitably, a fair few jumped ship before the end for various reasons, including the fact that not everything was truly included, nor was everything “hoped for” unlocked, and it might simply be too high a price for some to spend on a board game.

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#3 – Thoughts?

Still, overall I would see this as a success for Mantic Games. It is worth remembering that in the entire history of Kickstarter, less than 300 projects in the Games category (including video games) raised over US$ 100.000,-. With over half a Million, DreadBall Xtreme is probably in the top 100. Mantic Games might also be slowly outgrowing the format.

Let me know what you think?

Are you a backer of DreadBall Xtreme? Did you look at it and walk away again?

I would love to hear your comments!

Z.