11/3/15

Why You NEED Reviews in Your Kickstarter Game!


Our Kickstarter campaign is slowly coming to an end. It has been an intense couple of weeks, campaigning is harder than anyone can imagine.  We have made it a point to gather as much information as possible from our backers or those who have simply seen our campaign.

The response has pointed us to the areas we were good at and and to the areas we could improve. In the following post, I will focus on one of the aspects that came up in way over half the responses we got.

If you put yourself in the shoes of a board game backer, you discover that you're looking at a couple of things in order to decide whether you want to back the game or not. One of the most important things are the reviews. 

Reviews do a couple of things for your game. First and foremost, they give you credibility. If your game has been reviewed it means it works. One of the biggest setbacks for Kickstarter campaigns is that people don't know if you can pull off creating the game after the campaign has finished. People don't like backing games that haven't actually been made yet. A review can show your future backers what stage of designing you are actually in. 

Secondly reviews give the prospective backers a feel of what the game is like. Watching someone play is never as good as trying it out yourself, but it's second best. You can make your mind up if you like the game or not, backing becomes less of a guessing game.

Thirdly, reviewers have an audience. They help you get coverage. If you get the opportunity to work with someone influential, and they like your game, that can boost your campaign to another level.

In our campaign we had a few quotes about the game from people. Someone commented that they looked fabricated (which they weren't, honest!). I guess having it on video in a third party platform is more convincing. We got a lot of requests for reviews because people didn't understand the rules. We had instructions, but a audio-visual guide is so much easier to digest. 

All in all, we highly recommend getting your game reviewed. Before the campaign and during the campaign is best. that way you can let your first backers understand the game fully, and then gather an additional audience through different bloggers.

We'll know what to do next time!

Any questions? Any ideas? Please comment below :)

3 comments:

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  2. Which reviewers would you recommend?

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    1. That depends vastly on what is the goal. If we need reviews to spread the word about the project and go for maximum reach, we are then looking for reviewers that fill in with our product (so, a board game fans in our case) and try to contact reviewers with big number of readers or subscribers.

      If we aim for reviews that will work well with our game, the research need to be more deep and accurate, because then we need to find a reviewers that not only like board games in general, but is known from liking a particular genre of them. Sending a light, family game to a reviewer who reviews mostly hard and heavy gamer's game might not be the best choice ;)

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