Best time to run a kickstarter campaign

From a purely tax point of view you want to fund your game and ship it in the same year. So don't fund it before Christmas and ship after or you'll have to pay income tax on all that money you earned through the Kickstarter.

Other than that, I've seen games massively succeed and massively fail no matter what time of year it is.

Good morning!

Running a Kickstarter Project can certainly prove tricky, and the tax advice offered by the Game Crafter is well worth heeding. Regarding the launch date for a Kickstarter, I've run two successful (Crafthulhu and Cthulhu's Eldritch Knowledge) Kickstarter Projects (and an unsuccessful one), and timing does matter. Around the holidays, people tend to be more generous and generally more flush with cash. However, there are a number of folks who like to receive the Rewards before Christmas, which means, for most Projects, starting in the summer, which tends to be a time for low Kickstarter turn-out, leading to fewer Backers, and more unsuccessful ventures.

The current guru on Kickstarter Projects is Jamey Stegmaier, who has written nearly 150 separate blogs on Kickstarter, ran several wildly successful campaigns, and has been approached to write a book and is currently in the throes of doing so. Here's a link to one of most recent blo entries:

http://stonemaiergames.com/kickstarter-lesson-130-maintaining-peace-duri...

Good luck ~ PM me if you care to continue the conversation.

Cheers,
Joe

Hmmm... I'm pretty certain that my accountant explained to me that the income is NOT taxable until the product is SHIPPED. Meaning you don't pay taxes in the year you EARNED the money unless you earn and ship the product in the same year.

I'm pretty certain that he called it "deferred income".

I googled it ("Deferred revenue") and it matches the above description. IF you are running the campaign as an individual - I'm not certain about that. I own a company and run all my project related expenses via it. I used to be in the IT Consulting business (still am but Full-Time now) but my business is now used to pilot game development... Unofficially.

The good thing about using a company for your Kickstarter is that you can have LONGER delivery dates giving you more time to design/tweak and then manufacture and ship your game. Because the income is "deferred", a campaign can last like two (2) years... Which is good IF you are planning a large scale Kickstarter. Picture something with more than 1,000 backers.

For GENERAL CONSIDERATION, I prefer organizing my campaign such that the product is NOT shipped to customers during WINTER months. If it's going to take me three (3) months to ship - I don't want to be doing that during Winter months... So I would probably want to organize the campaign to ship in Spring like April-May and then product gets delivered during the Summer months... But that's personal because of Winter...

But I'm pretty sure my campaign will take more than a year - to produce the artwork, confirm a broker and then drop ship to my "house". After that I need to ship to individual customers... No way I want to do that during the Winter! :)