While many game developers are getting disenchanted with Kickstarter, crowdfunding successes are still popping up often enough to make it a tempting option. Late last week, Muv-Luv rocketed past its $250k goal to hit $350k in less than 24 hours. Unlike the prototypical video game projects on Kickstarter, however, Muv-Luv isn’t a new game offering a fresh take on a classic genre. Quite the opposite, it’s an English-language localization of a visual novel trilogy, an example of a genre obscure in most parts of the world.
Choose Your Own Adventure, Updated
Visual novels, as defined by Degica Global Director Sales & Promotion Mitchell Scott, are “a type of interactive fiction game that use static and sometimes animated graphics, and event images to tell a story.” Mitchell says that the medium has snowballed from its original Japanese audiences into a huge international following.
Muv-Luv itself began as a 2003 visual novel by Koki Yoshimune but grew into a multi-million-dollar franchise with two sequels, merchandise, and manga and anime titles. Japanese e-commerce company and games publisher Degica plans to work with Yoshimune and the game’s original production company, âge-soft, and ixtl to localize and update the trilogy with new content. They anticipate a March 2016 release on PC for the first two games, followed by the final game that summer. The games are also battling for votes on Steam Greenlight. Stretch goals include Android and PS Vita ports of the trilogy and a PC port/localization of previously console-only side stories.
“The incredible fan support that the Muv-Luv Kickstarter campaign has received so far shows just how popular visual novels can be,” Mitchell says. “The fact that many mainstream gaming sites still refuse to cover visual novel titles is shocking.”
Feeling the Luv
You could reheat the fan forum debate on whether visual novels even qualify as video games, but looking at the Muv-Luv campaign, it’s apparent that the niche’s audience has money and is willing to spend it. At least when they’re offered some carefully thought-out reward tiers. Muv-Luv’s most popular reward is the Trilogy Collector’s Box at the $150+ tier, which also promises backers access to all unlocked stretch goals. At the time of this article’s publication, nearly 800 backers had pledged in the tier. The $60+ tier was second, with just over 700 backers signing up to receive a digital copy of the trilogy. Almost 600 backers had pledged in brackets higher than the $150+ tier to snag rewards like plushies, mecha fighter models, anime character pillowcases, hoodies and pilot jackets. The total figures by publication time added up to more than 2,800 backers pledging over $470k with 35 days left in the campaign. The average backer so far pledged $165.17, more than double Kickstarter’s (undated) estimate of a $70 average pledge across the entire site.
“We believe that listening to what the fans want is most important and helped us smash our initial funding goal,” Mitchell says.
And while not on the Kickstarter page due to the site’s rewards rules, the team is also raffling off an all expenses-paid trip for two to Japan. Fans earn different numbers of raffle entries for different actions: Visiting the Kickstarter earns five entries, backing it earns 10, and various social media shares earn one or two.
Campaign Prep & Pretesting
The Muv-Luv team took about three months to prepare the campaign. They promoted the campaign at Anime Expo, Otakon and Comiket88 and used Prefundia to test their proposals. Early on in the process, Degica wanted to split each of the games into separate goals, but after their community strongly disagreed, they decided to lump the whole trilogy into the initial goal.
“As more users interacted with us, we began to know more about how they felt about certain items and adjusted our goals to their needs,” Mitchell says. “Overall, it was an enlightening, but fun, process and allowed for maximum clarity between our team and the fanbase.”
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