How To Crowdfund Your Game, kind of
My journey from having an idea to making it a crowdfunding reality
These past few months I’ve been doing something I’ve never done before: launching a crowdfunding campaign on my own for a physical product. I did learn a whole lot about it, and made mistakes that I hope I don’t repeat again in the future. I thought it could be fun to grab the things I learned and pour some of them into an article for you to read. This is my first Substack article, so I wanted it to be an interesting one, even though I don’t think I’ll have much more to talk about this in the future (at least for now).
My own first physical card game
After a walk I had at the beginning of the year (you can read more about that here in an interview), I came up with several ideas for projects. If I wanted to game design and game write for a living I needed to have many things on my plate. Luckily, the fact that I live in a third-world country that isn’t doing that well economically helped me quite a bit, as every single dollar is a whole lot for us.
I wanted to start this crowdfunding journey by doing something simple. That way, I could test the waters for future projects that are more complex, and involve more stuff. The game started out as a Zine-like product. I’ve seen many products like this make it and it shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish. I knew the game was going to be titled “What Is It That Lies Beyond The Immenseness of the Dark?”, and that it would involve drawing cards from a classical deck and answering prompts. Easy, right?
As the idea of the product kept growing in my head, and I kept writing stuff for it, I understood it would just be too uncomfortable having to carry both the zine and the cards, while going out to seek spooky places. The simpler and portable the better. That’s how, by taking inspiration from the games “For The Queen” and “The Quiet Year”, I decided to make my own custom cards. Now… what would that mean in terms of money to spend on printing?
Research
I’m extremely lucky of knowing lots of wonderful peeps in the game design environment that could guide and connect me with people to talk to or ask for consultancy. The people at DinoBerry Press were a HUGE help in getting me started. Their free consultation helped me realize I had to print the product, get a fulfillment partner, and properly select which crowdfunding platform I wanted to use. I’ve heard Kickstarter had some problems having the money funded from it reach Argentina, so I asked around a bit and decided to go with Crowdfundr. I also knew someone from Argentina that did a successful crowdfunding project on that platform, and after some talks with her (check out Armanda’s game!) I decided it could be a great choice.
Choosing the best printing company and fulfillment partners was particularly tough. Having some references to check out helped a big deal, but in all of those you need to find some calculator to know how much it is going to cost you. In other words, choosing which printing company and fulfillment partner better suits your project takes a lot of research. If the page doesn’t have any, you have no other choice than to message them via email. Fortunately, all the companies I talked with didn’t take longer to answer than a single business day. The conclusion I ended up with is that if you are going to be printing and shipping a huge deal of copies of your game then there is an intimidating amount of choices. However, if it’s only a few then you don’t have many choices if you want to make a profit or don’t want to end up with 500 copies of your game in your attic.
At the end of the day, these are the results I ended up with:
Printing companies
Mixam is the most affordable, but end results can vary.
Many people talk great of Spencer Printing, but I don’t have many people I know who have used it.
Print Ninja is the most expensive, but offers the best quality
The Game Crafter has a lot of variety of things you can do with it, but it might be a bit expensive
MakePlayingCards.com if it’s just cards you want. It has many interesting options to check out, similar to Print Ninja
DrivethruCards is the option I ended up going with. If you are just printing cards it’s the cheapest one out there and adds your game to the catalog for everyone to buy. Just don’t expect it to have as much printing variety as the other choices. It also does its own shipping to the clients, so you don’t need a fulfillment partner.
Fulfillment partners
I can’t talk too much about these because as soon as I saw DrivethruCards as a choice for printing + fulfillment I knew I was going to end up going with that one and I stopped researching. However, here are the options I was planning to take a look on:
Plus One EXP
Indie Press Revolution
Floating Chair Club
Exalted Funeral
Know that some of these may have too many things on their plate, so they might not be the best choice if you are just starting with your games, as they might not have time for you. You don’t lose anything by asking though, so I always recommend you send an email and see what they have to say. You might end up receiving an unexpected response!
Promoting, promoting, PROMOTING!!
If you are launching a crowdfunding campaign you need at least one or two months to promote your game. Originally I was planning on launching my game on May 2nd, but many people who have run campaigns before suggested I push the campaign back til I have done at least a bit of promotion. I recorded a video that quickly explained the rules of the game, and what it is about to catch the viewer’s attention, and made some nice-looking images and mockups.
Additionally, I made myself a plan on what and when to promote through all the social platforms I was running. I highly recommend you put reminders for this on your phone or calendar, as it can help a great deal!
Having this Google Sheets at hand is extremely useful as well. This contains a list of people that filled out a Google Form indicating they wanted to help promote games, supplements, products, and more, as well as make reviews, actual plays, etc. I made sure to contact most of the people in here asking for support promoting my game. I was surprised by how many people decided to help me for free! They absolutely rock!
Post Campaign Start Panic!
Of course like every time you do something for the first time I overcharged my games with things I wanted to add to it. I thought I was being clever by adding the “make the cards tarot size” and “add in a custom metal coin” as stretch goals. After giving this podcast a listen after the campaign started, I found out I was doing MANY things wrong. Some of the things there didn’t fully apply to me because my campaign was set as “Keep It All” (an option Crowdfundr has so that if your campaign doesn’t make it you don’t lose all the money), and because even if I didn’t make it I would end up making a profit. Nevertheless, I do recommend you give it a listen, as the folk in there give excellent tips. Fortunately, these didn’t affect me as much, and now I know how not to make the same mistakes in the future.
Promoting the game via social networks was a pain in the a$$. Firstly, I tried to promote via Twitter. In no place on the Twitter Business page do they tell you you need to have Twitter Blue (how will it end up being called now??) to promote a tweet. I only realized that after I had already paid to promote the tweet. Don’t make the same mistake I did. I had to send multiple emails to the folk on Twitter to receive a refund. Then, I tried Facebook promoting for FB and IG. Due to using a different email for Paypal from the one I had in the Facebook account I created in 2012, they restricted my payments. I had to go through numerous emails to try to solve this, and ended up not being able to promote there either. Next time I try this I will create a new FB account. Lastly, Reddit overcomplicated the way to pay them as well, so I didn’t end up spending too much time trying to accomplish that.
Final Words
At the end of the day, it was thanks to the help of the people from the Google Sheets I listed above that I was able to have my game come to life. I may create a Deluxe version of the game with everything I was planning on adding to the game in the beginning further down the road, but for now, I’m beyond excited with the results of this campaign. I will be traveling to Big Bad Con later this year to showcase the game, and possibly even sell some copies there. If you are going, make sure to come by!
Lastly, with all the recent changes to Twitter, I’ve decided to start moving towards Bluesky, which seems to be the new popular Twitter replacement. Click HERE if you want to follow me over there!
