“Crowdfunding is very difficult, and much more difficult than it was a year ago,” says XCOM creator

By Sherif Saed

Having started a successful Kickstarter recently, original XCOM designer, currently working on Chaos Reborn, Julian Gollop, was attending Digital Dragons game festival. While there, he gave a talk about his experience with the crowdfunding model and discussed what he had to go through even before the campaign was a thing.

Gollop talked to the crowd in attendance about what happened behind the scenes, even before the Kickstarter campaign was launched.

“I had done a lot of work on PR and promoting the game: on my blog, on Twitter, I got journalists looking at the game so I had coverage in print and online,” he began. “For me that was an easier process than for most because of my history and people were interested in what I was doing anyway, but still, it was a lot of work. I even delayed the Kickstarter [twice] all because I didn’t think the PR was sufficient yet.

“If you’re going the crowdfunding route, you have to do your PR and promotion consistently for months before you even start.”

Hollop’s Kickstarter campaign for Chaos: Reborn, the revival of the classic Turn-based RPG Chaos, was ultimately successful.

Speaking in an interview with with GI International following his talk, the veteran designer shed some light about how he sees the crowdfunding scene following successes like Double Fine and inXile.

“It would have been ten times tougher, for sure. Much, much tougher. Crowdfunding is very difficult, and much more difficult now that it was even a year ago. That’s the reality.

“You need to look at the games that are doing well on Kickstarter and figure out why, and your goal has to be quite low or you’re not going to reach it,” he added.

He also joked about how he would’ve made more money, had he been one of the early Kickstarter pioneers, noting that the early rush has definitely befitted the developers who sought it early on.

Thanks, PCGamesN.