Image courtesy: http://www.polygon.com/2015/2/25/8102751/exploding-kittens-kickstarter-rich

I’ll admit it, I backed the Exploding Kittens Kickstarter.  I have a particular weakness for clever, and Matthew Inman (author of The Oatmeal) manages to slather any project he’s involved with (even tangentially) with a tasty clever-sauce that puts even Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ to shame.

And, like everybody else in gaming, watching the Kickstarter blow past it’s original goal into OMFG!?! territory is a special kind of hell.  Because we know. For a while now, in videogames, one of the first questions you get asked when pitching is “Well, why didn’t you do a Kickstarter?”  It’s the new death knell for any pitch.  Its the producer’s subtle way of telling you that if you don’t have the Rockstars on your team to pull off a million dollar Kickstarter campaign, then you’re pretty much dead in the water.

But Kickstarter is a problematic platform for games.  It’s easy to over-promise. There are more than a few Kickstarters out there that have collected their money and have quietly gone under because the people starting them (despite their assurances to the contrary) did not know enough about what they were doing.  H*ll, even people with decades of experience (witness Double Fine) can face the end of a successful Kickstarter with a pocketfull of promises that they will go into debt delivering on.

From a mobile game designers perspective, this is a MASSIVE number of players.  In fact, this is the kind of win you can build an entire development studio on the back of, so you can see why a producer might want to know if you can pull off this kind of Kickstarter.

Of course, it doesn’t occur to them (or maybe it does and they’re just trying to get rid of you) that if you did pull off the million dollar Kickstarter, you wouldn’t need them in the first place.  Their opportunity to cash in would be a lost one.