It’s been a while since our last update but we were really busy with preparations for ISS Vanguard. Now we can finally summarize and reflect on the whole endeavor.

First of all, serving a huge crowdfunding campaign like ISS Vanguard is quite different from what we’ve been doing so far. Obviously, pledge managers often happen to generate a lot of traffic, but it’s nothing compared to a horde of Awaken Realms fans spamming “refresh” before a campaign launch ;) We’ve seen instances of even the biggest crowdfunding platforms collapsing in the first minutes of a campaign. We knew we had to make ready for a storm. After countless cycles of optimizing, load-testing, and analyzing, eventually came the launch day, and... nothing broke! :) The campaign launched, there was a minimal increase in page load times during the first 3 minutes, but then everything went back to normal and that was it. Just to give you an idea, during the first 24 hours of the campaign our servers processed 7,297,200 requests. At the same time, the project received 7,419 pledges and was viewed 514,380 times. A campaign like ISS Vanguard is pretty much as big as it gets. This is a very good indication of our capacity for handling projects of any size in the future. 

If you ran a crowdfunding campaign in the past, you may be aware that not all the funds from pledges actually go to the creator’s bank account. A portion is obviously consumed by platform and payment processing fees, but more importantly, some of the pledges are never actually collected due to card authorization issues. Typically, this can be as much as 5% of all pledges... BUT not on Gamefound ;) Thanks to our partnership with Adyen, we were able to collect over 99% of the pledges. This is something we will be bragging about for a while because it is WAY above the industry standard. Talking ISS Vanguard money, this is roughly $200k extra ending up on the creator’s account. 

We also gathered a ton of invaluable feedback from the backers during the campaign. Even during the draft phase, we received insights that inspired us to make drastic changes before launch. You wouldn’t know, but the UI for picking add-ons, rewards, and following stretch goals looked completely different a couple of weeks earlier ;) Of course, we’re currently working on more improvements inspired by user feedback for the next crowdfunding campaigns.

ISS Vanguard was only a pilot campaign and expect more campaigns popping up soon. On February 9th we have Kingdom Rush – Elemental Uprising from Lucky Duck Games (check out the draft here). There’s also something planned for March and April, but we cannot disclose any details yet.

We're currently in a “beta” period for crowdfunding on Gamefound. It means that you cannot just go and create a crowdfunding project on Gamefound like you would with a pledge manager. First, we want to work with a limited number of projects to refine the experience for both backers and creators. Once everyone is confident the platform is ready, we will open it for all creators.