Kickstarter success

I am really enjoying seeing xenonauts on kickstarter. Blown away by the support. Always thought that there was no longer an apetite for games with depth. Everything is 3D graphics and FPS. I've been following xenonauts since August last year - at which point I thought this was a small community of like minded 30+ year olds. 90% funding after 2 days is incredible to see!

Before the banking situation with kickstarter was sorted out, Chris was talking about going with the much smaller indiegogo. Watching xenonauts hit kickstarter, the first activity looked to be all xenonauts forum members - looking at the list of recent backers - at least 2/3rds of the backers have backed other kickerstarter projects previously. In other words many (most?) or the funds coming in are coming in from the established crowd sourcing community.

It goes to show how important accessing kickstarter has been for the project (over some of the other possible forums).

BTW muchos kudos Kilrathi, on providing the bank account route that enabled this to happen. I think for me this is the stand out community contribution so far.

30+ ahem. I was born in 1986 and I was brought up on games like Ufo: Enemy Unknown for the Amiga. And Rebelstar for the Amstrad which till this day is the only game my 67 year old dad was ever any good at, haha.

It's ok. It's not your fault these people seem so super mature and wise.

Or deeply cynical and sarcastic at early ages...

Still, it's good to see a labor of love succeed!

Were not cynical, were just.... never mind.

Were not cynical, were just....

Old.

To put things into perspective 50.000$ isn't that much money but it's nice that it's gathered up so fast, makes one optimistic about the future. I was afraid that with the 200$ tier being sold out there was going to be a big slowdown which makes being near the 50k all that sweeter. Will be interesting to see how far beyond the basic funding this goes.

Yeah, I think any new goals and updated reward tiers will impact funding going forward quite dramatically.

Well, I am just glad the kickstarter was met with so much support so quickly, any extra funding is extra content and from the list on the kickstarter page I must say I am excited for a few. Well done Xenonauts team!

If Chris decides to add pilot portraits and works out the UI artist niggles/costs etc, we could end up with a new source of funding at $200. 100 sketches would be 20k extra.

Yeah its not a massive amount, but probably still the equivalent to around a years wages for 2 or 3 team members which is nice. Its probably already equivalent to the amount they have made in pre-sales on Desura (this is just conjecture) so its nice to see.

With this model I suppose you probably want to break-even by launch time so that anything after is profit. Wonder how many people go in for pre-orders though, 40-50% of future buyers?

I also noticed that the Grim Dawn devs backed Xenonauts (and I know Chris pledged to GD as well before that).

That's cool about GD, I backed them as well. Feel bad about missing Wasteland 2, but ce la vie. I can still pre-order from their site (for $5 more and missing a little exclusive perk).

In hindsight I am very glad we didn't use IndieGoGo - Kenshi are on there and have raised about $1,500 in 9 days. They're not the most established indie project ever, but they've been around for a while and the game looks interesting so I imagine they'd be doing well on Kickstarter too...

Yeah, Kenshi is a well know title and an interesting one at that. It's almost certain it would've done well on KS. Dodged a bit of bullet there.