KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
Forget Zombicide, forget Shenmue 3, forget Exploding Kittens, none of them have received as much crowd funding money on Kickstarter as Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5 has. The dark and deep board game of unforgiving combat and settlement advancement has beaten them all and with less than two days to go, is edging ever closer to $10 million in pledges.
Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5, is an updated version of the original game which was Kickstarted back in 2012. Since then it's taken years of development and manufacturing to get a few thousand copies of the game and its miniatures out to backers and lately the developer, Adam Poots decided to make some more. So he took to Kickstarter once again.
What started off as a quick gold rush near the start of its campaign, steadied during the middle, but has now picked up again towards the end. Offering backers copies of the newly expanded core game, expansions galore, pin ups models, bases and a tonne of extras for their Kingdom Death campaigns, there's been plenty on offer and plenty of money sent his way in return.
At the time of writing the total sits at $9,905,499, with 37 hours to go. That's more than a million more than Exploding Kittens, the previously most crowd funded game on Kickstarter (Star Citizen doesn't count, as it earned most of its money from after-campaign pledges). It also now sits as the fifth biggest crowd funding campaign ever, only beaten by the likes of the Pebble Watch's various campaigns and the Coolest Cooler.
More impressive however is that it's done this with just 17,250 backers. Exploding Kittens had more than 200,000, while other top campaigns like Shenmue 3 and Torment: Tides of Nimura had around 70,000 each. But then again, Kingdom Death is a $250 board game, even at a discounted Kickstarter price.
With less than 48 hours left in the Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5 campaign, the developers have announced a new crossover with the Pathfinder RPG. Players will be able to play Pathfinder-like survivors in the dark and deadly world of Kingdom Death.
Note too that Poots recently said there would likely be a one to three month delay on a lot of pledges due to the popularity of the campaign.
Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.
KitGuru Says: I've played some Kingdom Death before and while a little heavy on the bookeeping, it's great fun. The name seems really uninspired though for a game that has had so much time and thought put into it.
Is there any sort of pattern at all to what succeeds on Kickstarter? I feel like there is not
It’s an interesting phenomenon. Kickstarters get noticed for lots of reasons, particularly prior successes from the creator, brand recognition, extensive pre-kickstarter hype campaigns, enticing and well presented campaign pages, innovative/interesting ideas, demonstrable truthworthyness, a capacity to accept constructive backer feedback and fulfilling a niche that makes kickstarting the product the only real option.
This Kingdom Death reprint became so successful because it meets pretty much every single one of those categories, except for the well presented campaign page (it’s an honest to god trainwreck considering how popular the KS is). The prior Kingdom Death kick starter to create the game in the first place turned out to be an unprecedented surprise success that solidified not only the designers credentials but also his integrity, since the initial pricetags for backers were ridiculously cheap to the point of bankrupting the company early in production, yet they still eventually produced more-or-less exactly the product people had been promised.The game became a rarity due to the dearth of funds to continue producing it after this initial print run, which created a demand for it after people learned it was pretty good. This demand became a self-sustaining unofficial months-long hype campaign all of it’s own that continued to boil upwards until finally the reprint was announced, allowing it to start with an already huge amount of support. That it had this to such an enormous degree made other peoples heads turn to check what the fuss was about, drawing in more people. The ever present worries of kickstarter backing don’t touch kingdom death too. This is due to the demonstrable competency of it’s creator tempered by a noticable efort to prevent the pricing mistakes made during the first kickstarter. It’s done a lot to make people stick with it despite the fact that Adam Poots, the lead director and designer, sounds like an illiterate idiot 80% of the time. Also, complex or expensive new boardgames are generally seen as a niche product that isn’t worth it for a big company to do the publishing for, so kickstarter is a super popular way to push them out of the ideas stage and get them made.
Gosh, didn’t mean to type so much but I guess I’m in essay mode tonight…
I’ve earned $84 ,000 until now these days working online moreover I’m a full time university student . I’m taking advantage of a web based business marketing opportunity I heard of and in addition I’ve earned such type of good money . It is undoubtedly user friendly and I am just so very happy that I found out regarding it . The capability with this is long-term . Here’s what exactly I do>>> FL-Y.COM/3kz0