Final Message from Her Interactive
Thank you so much for your support of our Kickstarter campaign. Unfortunately, we are not going to reach our goal and we feel it is best to pull our campaign and take in what we’ve learned. We’d like to share some of those lessons with you, which we’ve detailed below. We would also like to invite you all to send any feedback you might have to solved@herinteractive.com.
What we learned:
• Our fans are extraordinarily passionate.
We heard directly from most of you with both supportive and critical feedback. It was all very helpful and we are grateful for the time you took to tell us what you think. One measure of “passion” is the average pledge level we achieved. Average pledge levels for Kickstarter campaigns for games has been about $40. Currently we have an average of just over $45 per pledge. Thank you for your passion around Nancy Drew and our games!
• We needed to engage more people.
Kickstarter doesn’t provide all the metrics we would like to analyze this in detail, but it is clear to us that we did not bring enough people to our Kickstarter page. Fewer than 4500 people viewed our main Kickstarter video. Reaching more people involves multiple actions, but one key is to engage and excite people so that they in turn spread the word. Which leads to our next lesson learned:
• A port of an existing game is not exciting enough for new fans.
We love Tomb of the Lost Queen and we felt that we could reach a new audience on tablets and smartphones with a game that was already recognized by reviewers and fans alike as a great experience. But the reality is that a port of an existing title is just not that exciting for most people. Not only did this mean fewer backers, but more importantly, fewer people spreading the word about our campaign.
• Moving to new platforms is not necessarily interesting to current fans.
We heard from our a lot of our current fans who love our games and love Nancy Drew, but aren’t necessarily that excited about playing on a new platform. What we tried to convey was that broadening our reach for our titles would mean more sales and therefore the ability to deepen our investment in each new game. For all platforms. Unfortunately, this scenario did not resonate enough with our current fans.
• Our funding target was too high.
We set our target based on what we needed to do a high-quality port of our game. Our concern was that a lower target would commit us to the port without the funds to deliver that port. Given the disconnect between what we could likely raise and what we needed, it is questionable (now) whether a Kickstarter campaign was the right method to raise funds for a port.
Where we go from here:
We continue to believe that we must expand our current games to more platforms. We are looking at other ways to make that happen and will share any news about that as soon as we have finalized our plans. We continue to be excited at the potential of crowd funding through sites like Kickstarter. If we launch a new campaign (for this port or for something else), we will certainly incorporate the lessons learned from this one.
We want to thank you again for your support. We are grateful to each of you for your interest in our campaign and for your pledges.
Stuart and Megan
