Kingdom Come: Deliverance closed their crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter this week having raised an incredibly £1,106,371 (approximately $1.84 million). Backers numbered a solid 35,384 that supported one of the most successful rewards based crowdfunding campaigns for 2014. The project was organized by Czech Republic based Warhorse Studios who had encountered challenges in arranging traditional financing for the RPG but discovered crowdfunding success on the Kickstarter platform.
The WarHorse studio team posted a note thanking their many backers for their profound support:
A month ago, we were all pretty nervous. After almost two years of struggle, we faced a do-or-die situation. There was no other chance to get financing for our game than doing a crowd-funding campaign. No publisher was willing to risk their money on a weird, historical game for a “niche” audience. No investor was going to step in without proof that their investment was going to pay off.
It wasn’t all hopeless; we had research that proved that the ideas of our game were resonating with gamers. But other voices were skeptical – “Kickstarter’s popularity is waning.” “The Olympics will sap our coverage.” “We’re not true indies – Kickstarter isn’t for people like us…”
I was very nervous. I had done my homework. I had studied all the unsuccessful campaigns that asked for more than US$500,000, and I knew a lot about the campaigns for projects similar to ours that managed to raise way over one million dollars. Those that didn’t had done something wrong, or their games just weren’t good enough. But was our game good enough?…
….Hell, we even had problems finding a PR agency to represent us. We tried to hire several two months before the campaign, but everyone basically ignored us. Everyone told us that they don’t do Kickstarters – that press doesn’t cover Kickstarter projects anymore. Luckily, we met Corey Wade from US agency Sandbox Strategies, who believed in the project and quickly brought in Claudia Kuehl and Patrick Schroder from DELASOCIAL to focus on Germany. They got us in front of the press and thankfully the journalists responded positively and posted thoughtful previews of the game early in the Kickstarter campaign…”
Warhorse Studios, a highly accomplished team of game developers, easily proved the naysayers wrong. Turned away by the publishing houses, Dana Vávra, Martin Klíma and their team brought their project to the crowd and their and their vision was validated in an overwhelming fashion. Their original stated goal was to raise £300,000.
Kingdom Come is now one of the top 30 campaigns funded on Kickstarter and in the top 15 game projects. Games is the single biggest category on the Kickstarter platform having generated over $188 million in successful funding, with a 35% success rate, since Kickstarter launched.
With a growing base of committed fans Warhorse has committed to continue to raise funds by opening up their own web site to continue to accept contributions similar the approach of megahit Star Citizen.
A beta release of the game is expected to be released in mid 2015.
Related articles across the web
Have a crowdfunding offering you'd like to share? Submit an offering for consideration using our Submit a Tip form and we may share it on our site!
