Hero-U - Interview @KickstartVentures

 A new interview about Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption can be found at KickstartVentures.

You’ve admitted that the $400,000 originally asked for wasn’t enough to get Hero-U fully funded. Why did you undersell it and not ask for closer to what was originally estimated to cost?

Kickstarter is all-or-nothing financing. Had we asked for $800K or $1 million, the answer would have been “nothing”. We asked for as much as we thought we had a reasonable chance of receiving, and nearly failed at that. It took last minute heroics from many of our backers to creep over the finish line.

If I had it to do over, the goal would have been $150K, and we would not have promised a finished game. That would have covered a tech demo, artwork, and design that we could show in a second Kickstarter for the actual game. Instead, we did it backwards, raising $400K without anything like a game demo to show, and asking $100K now to make the game shine.

The successful Kickstarters since 2012 have been based on games already in an advanced development state. Chris Roberts raised over $2 million, and spent 2 years working on a prototype before coming to Kickstarter with Star Citizen. Yooka-Laylee is well into development and showing a polished play experience.

We used the Tim Schafer model of waving our arms and saying we had a great idea. Try to get $1,000 on a pitch like that today! Even in 2012, it was not enough to raise $800K for a couple of game designers without an established development house.