If you want access to a community focused on supporting early games in a way that can result in you getting the real money and data needed to make your game, check out the Ludare platform.

Ludare: www.ludaregames.com
Diesel Knights Kickstarter: www.kickstarter.com/projects/die...

This is also on top of the dwindling potential backers and total backing dollars spent on the platform each year.

This is part of why we are building Ludare, a platform focused on building early community connections and getting the resources to develop your games without risking potential players.

For example, putting your game on Steam as a demo is unlikely to reach the average user unless you really get the ball rolling yourself for the algorithm to catch it and spread it. Even then, those demo plays are risk some sales or give your game a bad reputation if it’s not fully ready for players.

Diesel Knight’s Discord is almost as big as it’s backer list showing that a large amount of support for something like a Kickstarter is going to come from those most interested fans.

However, building this community is hard today and very few if any platforms are there to support you.

One of the most important is how much work on outreach and community building (AKA marketing) needs to be done before and after the campaign to make it successful at all, let alone half a million dollars successful.

If you want the same kinds of tools that make early access so valuable for Larian, check out Ludare and the integrated data analytics that we are building.
www.ludaregames.com

However, you have to make sure you have the systems in place to make it valuable. Either way, really excited to see what Larian has in store.

So, we need to look at new solutions and data that can better show real sales potential. Things that are driven by player behavior and require a certain amount of work to do. On Ludare, we can expand your signals into play session details, progression, and net promoter score without extra work.

Not to mention that the early wishlists that get you attention and partners are the ones that covert the least. Wishlist generation is also testing a set of skills that typically would be taken on by publishers (marketing) or can be easily blitz scaled with enough capital.

If you want to improve the quality of data you are able to build with, reach out. DMs are open!

The expensive nature of these other insights largely came from the lack of a general solution and the overhead to build your own. Ludare is taking that first step to build a comprehensive data suite for the metrics that matter most for making a game and drive confidence from partners.

Part of the reason developers and publishers rely on that one metric is because it's the easiest one to be collected (it's automatic once you release a Steam page) and is the closest to real sales data that can be collected without serious resources and investment.

But the only major metric most studios gather, analyze, and present to publishers is whishlists which don't really indicate the quality of the game as much as the teams ability to market it. Which is an entirely different skill set than that needed to make a game.

Ludare is trying to build that new way through our low cost subscription and playtime based revenue sharing. If you are a developer making something new, or a player wanting to support new ideas, lets talk.

This has resulted in the total funding for video games halving across the same number of projects. Clearly this indicates that there is interest in supporting new ideas but not with the current, high risk methods.