Kickstarter by the Numbers

About two and a half months ago the guys over at War Balloon Games, the creators of the magnifique Star Command, put up a brave analysis of where their Kickstarter money was spent and what it was spent on. We’ve also been attempting to be as transparent as possible with our development and we figured it might be nice to give everyone a breakdown of our budgeting/spending since we wouldn’t be where we are without all you beautiful folks supporting us.

At the end of our Kickstarter campaign we’d raised a solid $24,320.

This was $4,320 past our original goal of $20,000 and we are pretty damn pleased with that.

After both Amazon Payments and Kickstarter took their cut of the money raised we were left with approximately $22,400.

Read after the break for the full low-down!

Although this was a pretty sizable amount of dough, we had yet to form a company or take care of any of the necessary legal work needed in order to make the new game. After consulting with our legal rep and going through all the necessary paperwork we had taken care of everything for about $1,150. This includes our incorporation, all contracts that we needed written up, and our trademarks.

For our kickstarter prizes, all domestic and international shipping costs were included in the donation amount. Shipping a t-shirt overseas usually cost us over $10. We initially thought this would average out with the number of people we knew in Chicago that we wouldn’t be shipping to and hey, it would be nice for our fans. What we didn’t count on was the number of international fans we had. 30 % of our t-shirt shipping was international, and $10-$15 shipping cuts into the fundraising of a $18 profit pretty quickly. If we had the chance to run the campaign over again and knew we had sooooo many fans from Australia, we might have asked for a little extra for international shipping. :P

In the end, with the great response we’ve gotten from the game, it really hasn’t cut us too deep.

All of the  costs are as follows:

• Shipping Materials and Costs – $2,088.75
• Prize Purchase Costs – $4,113.50
• Web Hosting and Related Costs – $363.86
• Software Licenses (So far) – $105.19
• Hardware (Computer parts and test PC(s) for minimum spec testing) – $243.49
• Con/Festival Booth and Submission costs (We front all our own travel/food.) – $605
• Evil Taxes of Evil (Federal and State) – $4285.89

One thing to keep in mind when running a Kickstarter campaign is that any profit is taxed as income, so make sure to keep track of all your expenses (we deducted everything, but we still got hit with some unrelated Tax Penalties that are still being disputed). Consult an accountant or at least a normal human dad that’s good at math before making any big financial decisions. Just don’t ask Octodad, he’s terrible at math.

If you noticed, we are not spending any of the money on living expenses. Almost all of it is going into the infrastructure to keep us developing and have a successful release. Most of us have full-time jobs, and those that don’t are getting by through personal investment/loans and some odd jobs and consulting work. In spite of our limited resources, we have averaged 160 man-hours a week in development over the past year and we are in good shape to release in 2013 (as long as we keep up our current rate of development). Developing a game is very expensive and for the heightened production values we’re throwing into Dadliest Catch, the development cost would easily exceed $500,000 for two years of development were we paying ourselves low wages and had a real office.

After all is said and done we’re currently left with about $9,760. Keep in mind though that we still have all of these things to pay for in the near future: