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I think you're massively underestimating the amount of work that goes into making a Kickstarter video there tbh. Even the video we had there probably took the team a solid two or three weeks, from me writing the script and shooting the video to all the programmers fixing problems and implementing new features so we could have enough "good" gameplay footage to show, to the artist making the maps and staging the combat scenes and recording the gameplay footage and then slicing everything together. The content is the problem, not the actual cutting together of the video ... although that does also take time. Your initial comment on our video was that we needed more staff talking (which we don't have) and more dynamic gameplay, which we didn't really have at the time either (no realtime geoscape or air combat). Also Sven can probably afford to spend plenty of time casually walking around the office chatting to people in his Kickstarter video updates because a) he actually has an office, b) he's probably not project managing the entire team on a day-to-day basis, and c) he's probably not replying to the Kickstarter messages / comments on a day-to-day basis either. Realistically none of that could be easily fixed, which is why I think we did a pretty good job with what we had available to us. I don't have a problem admitting that our video and campaign isn't up to the standards of some of the bigger and more successful Kickstarters by bigger and more successful companies, but we don't have the manpower to match them - particularly when the team need to be focusing on the closed beta we now need to deliver in three months!

Thanks for the thoughts. I think there's a few areas that need a bit of explanation, though. Firstly, for Paypal - as Max has linked above we're effectively banned from Paypal, otherwise we would indeed have added some kind of Paypal support. You are correct that setting up a store on our website may be a good idea and that's something I do plan to look into, although I don't feel it's inherently likely to generate any PR and it'll only be a stopgap measure for six months until we're available for sale on Steam / GOG in terms of pre-orders. However this does have the advantage that we would be able to continue to sell the "custom soldier" tier where you could pay $20 and put a soldier in the game with a face from the Portrait Editor - I think that's a reward that people who discover the game later in development (e.g. on Steam) may want to pick up. It's even something we could continue to do after release if we upload the new soldiers once a month or something. I think you probably just missed the press coverage that there was: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/06/20/xenonauts-2-kickstarter-playable-demo/ https://www.pcgamer.com/xenonauts-2-launches-crowdfunding-campaign/ Sure, it's only two articles but they're the only two big sites willing to write about our Kickstarter and they drove about 20% of our non-Kickstarter pledges. There was also a newsletter from GOG that was apparently sent out to the 550,000 people who own the game (which was why we did the free giveaway on GOG about two weeks beforehand). So I don't think it's fair to say we started doing it too late or didn't do enough, I think you're just seeing that it's a tough market out there and a developer doing a Kickstarter isn't really a news item unless the circumstances are in some way exceptional. Finally, you're correct that the videos were better for many other major high profile Kickstarters. But I think you're overestimating the size and PR capacity of our studio; there's only five full-time staff here at Goldhawk and two of those live well outside London and work remotely. The studios you're comparing us to there - Larian and Obsidian - are studios of 30+ employees with much bigger budgets than we have. Same for companies like Harebrained who did Shadowrun and Battletech etc, they're another big studio who do really successful Kickstarters but throw a lot more resources at them than we do. Those guys have full-time PR people and I'd be very surprised if they didn't have artists who work with video professionally on their staff full-time. That's not something we have access to; we don't even have a good location to shoot more video - for the video I had to borrow the meeting room in the office of a friend who works in a flashy tech startup down the road from us. So, yeah - you are right that our video wasn't as professional as some of the others you saw, but those guys are setting a very high bar. Broadly, I'm pleased with the way Kickstarter went. The amount of money a game raises on Kickstarter is generally only a small fraction of the sales that you get on Steam / GOG after release, and it's possible to chase the Kickstarter numbers too much if you're not careful. I was aiming to run a fairly conservative Kickstarter that was as efficient as possible - one that generated as much usable revenue for the game whilst sucking up as little of mine / the company's bandwidth as possible (because the key thing is to make the game). I think we did a pretty good job there; all the rewards are digital and most of them won't cause us that much trouble to fulfil ... which is a very different story to the physical rewards in Xenonauts 1. I think if I was going to do it again I'd probably try and get a website set up on our site that did support Paypal, as there's third-party solutions that would let us do that. I'm not sure it's something that would have made a big difference but it's something we're looking at doing now anyway so in retrospect I probably should have done it in advance.