We still believed that it was a disservice to undercut them. Which was the same pledge level as the Kickstarter backers. Over the next few months we dropped the price on a trajectory towards the beta price of $60. Alpha was bitter sweet in that it brought in revenue to keep us rolling but left a PR stain that would follow us around. We needed to hire to cover this new wrinkle.
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Do we upset our Kickstarter backers who believed in us or upset the new players wanting in? Community management and customer service became a full time job. Even some popular YouTube personalities had strong negative responses. Posts bashed us for our greed and our disconnected view of games. Large 1000+ response threads on the Steam forums appeared. It would be a disservice to our backers, in our eyes, to undercut them. It only made sense to us to charge new players the same. We gave backers two weeks to play the alpha before we let anyone else in. The Kickstarter backers who pledged to get into the alpha gave us $90. We started selling PA on Early Access for $90. Games are expensive to build PA’s total development cost was four times more than what we brought in via Kickstarter. We needed to start selling the game to bring in revenue. You can find yourself in a no win situation. This is the point where we learned our first big Kickstarter lesson. We found ourselves, once again, on the forefront to a new funding mechanism. On Jwe released the Alpha for Planetary Annihilation on Steam’s new service called Early Access. Then reality set in … we have to build this game! The ride we had been on for a month ended in a live stream party celebrating our success with our fans.
The smiles you see from Uberites in the videos were genuine. It was an amazing time at Uber Entertainment. After the ~10% you lose for various reasons, we brought in just over $1.9 million. September 14th, 2012 the pledge process ended with $2,229,344 pledged from 44,162 backers. Doesn’t matter what it is, we’ll never get there.’ … And then we got there! Two days before we finished we were sitting in our office saying ‘We should come up with stretch goals for $2 and $2.1 million. We didn’t realize at the time that a large amount of funding comes in right as a pledge drive is about to end. Every week after the funding level just kept going up. The more goals we announced, the more money we would bring in, the bigger a game we would commit to building. Success! The company would continue and we could start building the game.įor the next two weeks we continued to work on updates and defining stretch goals to keep the funding coming. On August 29th, 2012, Planetary Annihilation, reached its $900,000 funding goal. Everyone was involved at some point because it meant having a future for the company.
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The rest of the team would help out with update videos, live streams, and sometimes write posts. The project leads, Jon and Steve, focused on constant updates, answering questions, and getting the word out. The future of the company was at stake and we were betting on an new funding model no one had yet truly figured out.ĭoing a Kickstarter is a full time job for several people during the time the pledge drive is active. Our previous title, Super MNC, was a critical success but was not bringing in enough revenue to continue running the studio. The magical barrier of six zeros was something we hoped we would cross later in the pledge drive, if we funded at all. Fans might not back the project if the goal seemed unattainable. For perception reasons, we avoided setting the goal at a million dollars. We could ship something with that kind of funding, if we had to. The original plan was to ask for $900,000 to get the game started. We learned plenty about taking money in such a public way, both positive and negative. We believed that Kickstarter gave us the creative freedom to pitch a game and have complete control over it. We decided it was our turn to take that plunge shortly after Double Fine Adventure, which kicked off the crowdfunding craze. In 2012 when the industry was witnessing the first $1+ million Kickstarter campaigns. Uber has always tried to stay as independent as possible, avoiding publisher involvement where we could.
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