Announcing Swamped on Kickstarter! My first professionally published game.

Hi, I'm Dennis Hoyle from Bellwether Games, the publisher for Swamped. Please let me know if you have any questions about the game, the Kickstarter campaign, or publishing in general.

Thanks!

It's great to hear a success story! There are a number of hardworking game designers out here but less than 1% will actually ever get a game published so it's great to see your success over a Kickstarter.

Cheers,
Joe

Thanks. It's funny to note though that your 8% KS estimate gets dragged down to 1% when you include BGDF users. :) I would be curious to know how your figures would change if you estimated only according to those projects that were obviously viable at launch -- i.e. the projects that do "everything right" versus the stillbirths like:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1412548814/the-chase-the-nascar-boa...

or

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/206182637/galactile-supremacy-strat...

to name 2 of the majority of projects on KS. The good news, as I see it, is that professionally managed projects seem to perform fairly well -- maybe not the first time around, but I've seen plenty gain traction the second time. The bad news is that the market is less receptive thanks to that initial outpouring from backers who received truly shoddy and uninspiring work from creators who were handy with the polish but short on brass tacks. I'm going to have a very hard time convincing one friend to give KS another chance after he backed his first project, the Lone Wolf RPG, only to receive a very watered down game book with loads of recycled, amateurish artwork. The consensus among my friends is that KS nerds are proportionately just as awful at managing a business as the nerds who open game stores, which makes the comparable rate of failure both inevitable and well deserved.

Congratulations! The very affordable $12 price makes it all the more impressive to have hit $12k, especially with people buying six copies at a go. I'm sure it is a great feeling to know that your game is getting into many hands and having such great exposure.

Hi! Great discussion here!

Just to chime in about Kickstarter research. It is definitely something we take really seriously. We begin obtaining quotes and planning out the numbers long before we even start on things like art/design or promotion.

There are a lot of hidden costs out there that I think many people don't look for. Fortunately there are also a lot of great resources (thinking of Stonemaier Games Kickstarter Lessons) and stories of people who have lost big by raising too much, to help the rest of us learn how to do it.

For us at Bellwether Games, no matter how fun a game may be, if it can't be published without "losing our house" in the process then its not worth doing.

Ben Gerber's Swamped stuck out because of how much awesome gameplay is packed into a small package. That's a great ratio for building a project and we're excited to have gotten the chance to take a shot at it!