In this series of Kickstarter advice posts I am going to be analysing over 750 responses from our survey, and what better place to start than a top-level summary?

OVERALL SCORES

I asked participants to vote on 21 items and each has been given a score based on the average level of importance people rated them.

The scores range from -652 all the way up to 1120, where 0 represents no interest either way.

Warning: There is a lot of important information behind the average scores and they should only be used as a starting point. For example, if an item received 50% of votes saying “very important” and 50% saying “make it go away”, the average score would be 0. I will be diving into this detail in other articles.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?

By itself this doesn’t mean much, it’s probably safe to assume having a short overview of the game, showing what’s in the box and having good artwork is a good starting point for anyone creating a Kickstarter.

It’s also probably safe to assume social goals and early bird options are probably best left out of your campaign, but we’ll explore this further in the coming articles.

THINGS THAT CAUGHT MY EYE:

• Artwork is considered more important than original game mechanics, and whilst I’m sure many people could have guessed this, it’s still interesting to see the numbers.
• I didn’t expect the Kickstarter price being less than the MSRP to be so high, this has proven to be a very important thing to many backers.
• It was a nice surprise to see the importance of having created previous projects was fairly low, with the risk of backing a first-time creator not being such a big deal to many people.
• Miniatures seemed to have a fairly negative reception and again this is somewhat surprising to me given the general comments I see floating around in designer forums.
• Reviews are much lower down the list than I expected.

Finally I would like to point out that the score for exclusives was the biggest shock for me, and you can read more about the exclusive stats here.