Summary
Well, it is painful to admit it, but I failed. I'm sorry to have to tell you this, despite your participation and encouragements, I wasn't able to make this crowdfunding campaign a success. Before discussing the reasons for the failure or what happens next, I’d like to thank everyone who participated in this campaign: thank you for believing in this game 😌!
The rest of this message is a bit long; it details the likely causes of my failure and how the project will move forward.
Possible reasons for failure
After taking a step back and conducting an initial assessment, I’ll outline below the possible reasons for the campaign’s failure. I don't know if they are right or wrong, I may miss some, and these reasons may add up:
The game isn’t interesting, because the gameplay—which relies on messages and true fog of war—isn’t actually fun. This is a critical reason. If it is true, I should stop working on this game.
The game may be interesting, but the gameplay is poorly implemented, or it lacks certain features. For example, a new command to order units to harass a regiment, to feign an attack, or better autonomous behavior for battalions.
The gameplay is poorly explained. This may be due to the tutorial, the presentation videos, and/or the user interface.
The game isn’t appealing enough. The graphics and animations still look too amateurish, the user interface needs more work, and the music and sound effects are too basic.
I can’t seem to make videos or take photos that interest people. I probably include too much gameplay footage and in-game images in my videos. I think this is honest and realistic, but as a result, these videos don’t sell the dream as well as those for other games. For example, the first Kickstarter video was nice and used same music as in Barry Lyndon, but it was not epic enough. I found Kickstarter page nice at beginning of the campaign, but it may be not pretty enough...
The marketing is poorly managed. Well, I’m sure everyone has figured that out by now, since I messed up the start of the campaign by launching it too early 😫. But that’s not the only problem. I wasn’t able to get people on Steam interested in this crowdfunding campaign. I thought that by converting some of my 5,000 wishlists, I could make this campaign a success. However, I didn’t manage to do that. My community on other platforms is great, but too small. This is due to my shortcomings in communication, as well as the points mentioned earlier.
Next steps
I’m going to take some time over the next few days to think all this through. But I’m also looking forward to hearing your thoughts about it: they matter to me, and you might have much better ideas than I do for moving Kriegsspiel ~ 7 Years’ War forward! In any case, I launched this crowdfunding campaign so I could work full-time on the game. That won’t be possible. I was able to work full-time on the game and the crowdfunding campaign for four months, but now I need to go back to my day job. After that, I’ll reprioritize and go through the game’s backlog again to see if—and how—I can turn it into a good game.
Thank you for reading this far. Feel free to share your thoughts here, or on Discord: https://discord.gg/G73PTUYYTs
Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who participated in this campaign. I’m sorry I won’t be able to deliver a game that interests you within a year. I’ll do my best to ensure that the next phase of development is more successful.
See you soon, Franzoar (François)