Day Two - The Search For Day One`s Success

Does anyone know or has seen whether a Kickstarter drive can be extended once it has started? I can't think of any possible reason not to go ahead and do the 2 months worth. If the pace does slow down, it might have been the extra bit needed.

Hey there! Long time lurker here. I registered here specifically to say one thing:

Guys, the sky isn't falling. Certainly not yet.

In fact, the campaign has been doing rather well so far, and I am sure Chris and Aaron are actually quite happy with it's success so far.

But I'd like to get some misconceptions out of the way.

First of all, most popular gaming and adventure campaigns have been running for a month. Tim Schafer used that time frame, Leisure Suit Larry did it, Wasteland did it as well. In fact, only Jane Jensen has used 45 days so far, and I remember the gaming community criticizing her for choosing such an extensive campaign length, back when it started.

In fact, back then I read in several places, that longer campaigns don't earn more money on average, since you also get more people removing their pledges over time, people changing their mind about the pledged amount, etc. It evens out.

Now, in Jane's case, 45 days were actually a wise choice, as it turns out that the beginning of her campaign was actually very muddled and incomprehensible to a lot of the audience. She needed some time to turn things around. And she suceeded in the end.

However, if you are worried about Tex, check out the Kicktraq graph of Jane's project. She did 22.000 on her first and by far best day. Ever since then it's been about 9.000 a days with occasional spikes inbetween.

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/100536 ... -2013-csg/

Now, in comparison, you can have a look at the Leisure Suit Larry project. Just like Tex, that project is based on a legendary adventure game developer returning to his franchise after a long absence.

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/leisur ... ome-again/

As you can see, Larry had a huge amount of pledgers (and pledges) in the first two days (however, Larry started much later in the day - so it's more like a day and a half). However, the money raised was pretty much comparable to what Tex did in that timeframe. After that, it bottomed out to lots of days with 10 - 20.000 dollars raised. But once again, whenever the project makers announced something new, posted a cool update, or specific media sources reported, there were some quite amazing spikes.

This can, should and probably will hapenn for Tex too. After all Larry raised 650.000 in the end.

Tex will never raise the money Double Fine got. Nor will he raise what Wasteland and Shadowrun earned. But despite that, there's a lot of people out there, who have very fond memories of the character.

At times it will be rough. On some days we will despair, on others we will be over the (Killing) Moon with happiness. But if you guys despair right now, you are not doing yourself any favours. So far, day 3 has been going pretty much as day 2 went. That's not a bad sign.

But for the days ahead ... things WILL get worser. And then, they will get better again. But if Chris and Aaron play the media game in the right way, they will suceed. If not, I'll go and eat my Fedora.

You-Have-Fax welcome. Thanks for the info. Good to know the campaign length isn't a problem.

thanks for the post, I wouldn't really start to panic until after a week

You-Have-Fax, ok, you can take the torch from RandomExile

Since I went to bed last night, the pledges are up just over $7,000. That's about $1,000/hour which is more than enough to reach the target if that can keep going. We need $10,000 per day or more to get to the funding goal. $20,000 would take us far beyond $450,000.

I sent emails to Kotaku and Joystiq yesterday, but they haven't posted anything. These are high-traffic blogs that could potentially generate a lot of interest.

One thing I might suggest for the Kickstarter page is gameplay footage from UAKM, Pandora and/or Overseer. I'm sure most big Tex Murphy fans have already pledged and the page has to win over non-fans who've either never heard of Tex Murphy or have never played the games. I'm not sure the current video accomplishes this.

Encouraging more Tex-friendly sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun to do follow-up articles will help keep it in people's mind as well.

Matthew Buckstein wrote:Since I went to bed last night, the pledges are up just over $7,000. That's about $1,000/hour which is more than enough to reach the target if that can keep going. We need $10,000 per day

we need you to sleep more!

By the way, just to show you guys how unpredictable gaming Kickstarters can be, have a look at the day-to-day results of recent media darling Republique.

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/486250 ... laj-logan/

Now, that's a strange one. Started bad, got worse(r) and finally shot up through the roof. Why? Because the enthusiast media was banging Republique's drum like crazy, almost ordering their readers to splash out on this game.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I dunno. But if Republique can do it, Tex should have no problem, right? The only thing I'd like is for Chris and Aaron to be more visible (I.e. do more PR, get someone with press contacts to send out press releases to major news outlets, etc.) and for social media to pick up on this. Tweets from the likes of Tim Schafer and Minecraft creator Notch have been known to send the needle up in terms of funding for several Kickstarters.

But this kind of thing will happen. It always does with the worthy projects. And DRM and DLC bitching aside, the Project Fedora kickstarter has seen some very positive reactions so far.

Next up:

In two days, Jane Jensen's project is ending. After that, a lot of fans will move on to the next worthy adventure project. After all, Jane got her biggest upturn once the Leisure Suit Larry Kickstarter community moved on.

Man, Chris and Aaron should offer a replacement F5 key as one of their incentives. I will sure need one in a couple of weeks ...

Thanks, You-Have-Fax, for your input!

I just noticed that suddenly in the last couple of hours somebody has kicked things up a notch with pledges. I was waiting for $170k to hit, and suddenly it's at almost $172k. Faint not, nor despair. Not yet, anyway.

EDIT: scratch that, it's now just under $174k!

You-Have-Fax wrote:By the way, just to show you guys how unpredictable gaming Kickstarters can be, have a look at the day-to-day results of recent media darling Republique.

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/486250 ... laj-logan/

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/251414 ... ct-fedora/

I know the numbers are high because we only have 2 days worth of data (and also because of the high amount of pledges on the first day coming from old fans that were already aware of the campaign) but It would be great if Tex could reach the end of the KS campaign with the "Trending Toward" amount

Jerry Dan wrote:EDIT: scratch that, it's now just under $174k!

You're almost as synchronized as the KS widget on the sidebar

hgorni wrote:

Jerry Dan wrote:EDIT: scratch that, it's now just under $174k!

You're almost as synchronized as the KS widget on the sidebar

D'oh!

But really, I was trying to point out a difference in a particular span of time. In just three or so hours it jumped up $5,000. Sidebar won't tell you that.

Jerry Dan wrote:

hgorni wrote:

Jerry Dan wrote:EDIT: scratch that, it's now just under $174k!

You're almost as synchronized as the KS widget on the sidebar

D'oh!

But really, I was trying to point out a difference in a particular span of time. In just three or so hours it jumped up $5,000. Sidebar won't tell you that.

Let's hope it can keep up the pace and that it speeds up after Jane's campaign ends. *fingers crossed*

BTW, it would be nice if Kicktraq provided a widget showing the trends by day, week, etc. It could be added below KS' widget on the sidebar or (even better) they could incorporate KS and Kicktraq info into a single widget.

Somebody in the Kickstarter comments just noted that Project Fedora has now overtaken the Two Guys of Andromeda's Space Venture in the amount of money pledged. Pretty great for Tex, considering the Space Venture has been online a week longer.

Sad for the Two Guys though. I certainly want them to be able to make their dream game as well. They sure as hell deserve it. Let's hope both projects pull through in the end. As far as I am concerned, this little adventure renaissance has been the best thing to happen to gaming in a long, long time.