[Kicktraq] RimWorld KickStarter's pledges trending/projection/daily data...

[SpaceEatingTrex]

After kickstarters cut and the small percentage of failed pledges every project gets, I wonder what the take home will be?
Good news is I think the give a week for failed pledges to be corrected, btw how are you doing on the paypal front?

On a related note, I believe the rule of thumb is to plan for 2% loss in failed pledges, however because the majority of RimWorld backers are in the lower tiers I think RimWorld's better off than other projects in this regard. With Kaiju Combat the most loss from failed pledges came from people taking the higher tiers ($500+).

Glad to see RimWorld being so successful! I hope that bodes well for the future.

[LobsterSundew]

Wow, thanks for the analysis Lobster - and where did you get that table? May I share it?

Feel free to share it. I plan to make another one when RimWorld's campaign is over. Kicktraq's Daily Data tab is a useful tool, but I needed a more internal view of what was happening inside of campaigns to continue to improve the reward structures I engineer. I've only started to graph campaigns factoring in time like this since September. Before then I would just look at the final numbers without being able to see changes in backer preferences over time.

Kicktraq monitors the net change in backers and pledges for the day so sometimes it doesn't tell what is really going on. For example Taxi Journey added a $10 tier that ended up cannibalizing the $20 tier so the campaign became very inefficient at raising funds (Two steps forward and one step back). From just the Kicktraq page I would suspect a large pledge had been withdrawn. There can also be early signs a campaign will stall out like the bar chart shapes of many of the tiers for Blood Alloy becoming more roundish around September 17th. Large individual pledges like someone picking a $500 tier can often make things look better for a day than they really are on Kicktraq.

For extra fun, I made a comparison table. Interestingly, RW seems to have much steadier income day over day than a lot of projects. I think this reflects the fact that support comes from a lot of small sources, not a handful of big articles. Most of our in-links now are from YouTube.

RimWorld has been getting very steady growth for its $20 and $30 tiers without surges. On Kicktraq the most important graph for me is the "Backers Per Day" one. Even Hyper Light Drifter showed more fluctuation during the middle of the campaign for its main tiers like on September 30th. The lack of huge pledges may be a factor. Hyper Light Drifer was also adding and limiting a lot of reward tiers over its campaign which could have effected the structure's dynamics. As well, there is less reliance on the booms from big press coverage that you have noted because being near the top of Video Games category in the Discover section is providing a lot of exposure for regular Kickstarter visitors and RimWorld is also getting regularly talked about in a lot of forums like Bay 12. A large part of the target audience of gamers who've played games like Prison Architect and FTL should have been made aware of the campaign through its presence on Steam Greenlight, Reddit and IndieDB. Neverending Nightmares is an example that shows changes in the shape of the bar charts when events happened like a popular Let's Player posted a video about it or the $15 tier taking off after the $10 early-bird was depleted. Instead of just single demo videos, I noticed that a lot of YouTubers are making series out of RimWorld so that too could be helping with consistent exposure.

By adding a plus (+) symbol to the end of RimWorld's shortened Kickstarter URL you can see some of the stats for how the link is being shared. From 9am to 11am on October 17th something caused a surge in the project link being clicked.

[C.B. Klausberger]

From the first Day of Kickstarting, this Game and its possibility´s really flashed me.

The Way of Communication of Tynan and his exemplary "straight-forward" in terms of his Funding-Strategy + a good and understandable Gameconcept looks like the right way to get a modestly orientated Target of 20.000 to a possible 300k-or-more Funding!

Even if there are many possibilitys in changing the Strategy (i.e. placing some [pseudo-]Strechgoals), its this straight-lined Concept that really convinced me and maybe others.

Please don´t change the Way it started!

[SteveAdamo]

just posted this in the campaign comments, but thought it went well here too...

with t-minus 4 days until the campaign concludes, here's some numbers to crunch, with the 200k goal in mind:
- the campaign has averaged $5,000 per day (just over last 7 days - its a more realistic number)
- $186,958 pledged at time of this post
- with a 200k target, that leaves $13,042
- which equates to $3,260.50 necessary per day, to surpass 200k

[Semmy]

just posted this in the campaign comments, but thought it went well here too...

with t-minus 4 days until the campaign concludes, here's some numbers to crunch, with the 200k goal in mind:
- the campaign has averaged $5,000 per day (just over last 7 days - its a more realistic number)
- $186,958 pledged at time of this post
- with a 200k target, that leaves $13,042
- which equates to $3,260.50 necessary per day, to surpass 200k

alot needs to happen for the 200K not to be reached.
I think with the paypall option that tynan has already reached it.

[CustodianV131]

Yup, I was wrong with my 180k estimate... pretty happy to be wrong

[SteveAdamo]

I think with the paypall option that tynan has already reached it.

oh good grief... i completely forgot to account for PayPal pledges (forgot that was even available, to be honest)... have we heard any numbers there? but yes, certainly seems possible at this point...

here's a preemptive "congratulations on 200k Tynan!" ...

[Tynan]

oh good grief... i completely forgot to account for PayPal pledges (forgot that was even available, to be honest)... have we heard any numbers there? but yes, certainly seems possible at this point...

here's a preemptive "congratulations on 200k Tynan!" ...

Yes, 200k was actually passed Friday evening The PayPal has 30k in it right now, post-fees.

[SteveAdamo]

Yes, 200k was actually passed Friday evening The PayPal has 30k in it right now, post-fees.

wow, thats fantastic!

and it would seem the KS campaign is indeed on track to surpass the 200k mark, as yesterday stayed true to the average (with over 5k brought in), and today has already passed the halfway  mark (sitting currently at $2,545)...

[LobsterSundew]

RimWorld finally had a significant spike in funding on October 29th. It looks like the Kickstarter "trough" is over for RimWorld. The 8,000 backers milestone is approaching and the $30 tier is also almost contributing $90,000.

There was a small Twitter surge on that day, but I'm still searching for a more likely source of the new backers. The last 48 hours e-mail notices shouldn't have gone out yet. A Google search for the last 24 hours didn't have any big blog post that I could find. I thought NeoGaf was a possibility as it should be voting on the best indie games for October right now, but there have been RimWorld threads there already. I haven't read through the comments tab on the RimWorld project page because there are so many.

[salt1219]

The spike is 10,000$ bigger than I expected to see.  I read the comments and there are a few people posting that they have been fallowing the project and finally backed.  I don't think they make up a big enough number to account for that.

Frankly I'm puzzled too, any chance a bunch of people upped their pledge to the next tier?

[Tynan]

I've been confused as well. Some things that did happen:

-RimWorld was on the main Kickstarter front page, if you click three or so pages into the popular projects slider-list.
-Scott Manley made a video that day which had 15,000 views

There were some upgrades but nothing insane. It's mostly new pledges, as usual.

[JimRaynor56]

I've been confused as well. Some things that did happen:

-RimWorld was on the main Kickstarter front page, if you click three or so pages into the popular projects slider-list.
-Scott Manley made a video that day which had 15,000 views

There were some upgrades but nothing insane. It's mostly new pledges, as usual.

Scott Manley's video was what made me back on the 30th.  Can't wait for the game either, very excited and I really love the direction you seem to want to take with it.

[SteveAdamo]

Scott Manley's video was what made me back on the 30th.

i think its safe to say Mr. Manley is (almost entirely) responsible for the monumental surge in pledges since the 29th... with the last three days of the campaign being the best overall, and today (currently) sitting as the 6th best with three hours to go (and showing absolutely no signs of slowing)...

thanks Scott!

[LobsterSundew]

The final numbers are in and a graph is below. RimWorld continued to be a steady growing campaign until the surge over the last 4 days. I don't recall seeing a successful campaign before behaving that consistently for so long with its numbers for daily backers.
http://imgur.com/XjlXof9

There was a per backer average of $28.23 and that was impressive without any of the tiers higher priced than $600 being occupied. The $30 tier was the biggest contributor at $118,530.

With the additional $30,000 from PayPal that means more than $300,000 in funding before fees and taxes. That means RimWorld is around 1500% of its minimum goal.