Kickstarter

Thank you!

We Happy Few has officially reached its goal! We are at $263,000 and 5900 backers! All of us here at Compulsion would like to sincerely thank all of you for your incredible support. From the moment we announced the game, we received so much love, and now thanks to all of your encouragement, we will be able to bring it to you.

You guys made all the difference in getting us to the finish line - as you will see below! As a maturing independent studio, we don't have the same kind of public reach as big developers, but we felt that - if we presented a strong game to the community - and worked hard at spreading the word, then people would come.

Since this is our first Kickstarter project, and we weren't sure how to make it successful, we simply tried everything. We reached out to press outlets, reached out to our community on FaceBook and e-mailed everyone we knew in the videogame industry to help spread the word. This gave us a nice initial surge, and built some excitement around the campaign, but compared to the stuff you guys did? Small Potatoes.

 This graph is a combination of three things: how many people checked out our page (Google Analytics), how much money we raised per day (Kicktraq), and a timeline with major activities that happened during the campaign.

Our initial spike was really solid, so it looks like going to PAX East, creating a good Kickstarter campaign and video, and spreading the news as best we could before the campaign was actually quite effective (as we’d hoped). There were some early champions in the community, such as Jim Sterling and the /r/games AMA we did, but we started to fall off pretty quickly. And by quickly, we mean really quickly.

We suspected this might happen. E3 happened during the week of 15 - 19 June, and traditionally the week before that is really, really slow as the hype builds for E3 (the wisdom is, never try to do a damn thing in the public sphere in video games during these two weeks, unless you’re Blizzard, Valve, or another big dev). We went to E3 knowing that the campaign would be slow that week, but we didn’t anticipate exactly how slow it would be the week before.

Thankfully, something happened: you guys continued helping us spreading the word on social media and things just took off again. As you can see, the spikes in the campaign coincide perfectly with one of you nice people discussing or posting about the game on public, social forums like Tumblr, Reddit or Imgur. Funny that :) As we’ve said a couple of times, which we’re now backing up with data, we really could not have done this without you. While we may work hard at providing you with updates, reaching out to the press and through our own social channels, nothing compares to you guys spreading the word directly.

So thank you. Thank you for believing, for helping, and for being so supportive from the get go.

Now, onto some housekeeping!

Pre-Alpha

As we’ve had a lot of people asking, we want to reiterate what’s going on with pre-alpha keys. As we have said in our FAQ, we’ll be able to send out pre-alpha keys shortly after the campaign ends. This depends on two things:

1) the campaign actually finishing (ie, Saturday this week), and  

2) us investigating the best way of sending keys to you.

We have to send out over 1000 keys, so email is going to be very unreliable. We’re looking into this, but once we have it ready to go, we’ll post an update and get the ball rolling. Hopefully we’ll be able to do this in the week after the Kickstarter ends, but if step 2 takes longer than expected, then it may take more time. We know you guys are eager to get playing, and obviously we’re looking forward to your feedback as well.

Status of Pre-Alpha Build

We’re currently hard at work preparing the build for those of you who have backed the Pre-Alpha tier. We are releasing an initial update this week for testing with our friends & family, in preparation for the Kickstarter backer pre-alpha build. If you would like to read the build notes, you can check them out here! And don’t worry, we did not preemptively release some keys before the end of the campaign - the only people that have access to the build right now are our PAX contest winners, our friends and family, and a few Youtubers and media who helped us get the word out.

For the next two weeks, we’ll be working on a technically focused update, to optimize the game to run better and on more of your machines.

PayPal

We’ve received a lot of questions about the possibility of using PayPal for donations, and we are looking into it.

Stretch Goals!

And finally, we are closing in on our very first stretch goal! Hurray! Let’s keep this train going until the end :)

Naila and the team at Compulsion