Harebrained Schemes just closed another very successful Kickstarter campaign, raising more than $2.8 million for a new turn-based mech combat game set in the BattleTech universe.
A Long Legacy
Harebrained Schemes Creative Director Jordan Weisman co-created the BattleTech franchise with the launch of a tabletop game in 1984; since then, the game has seen several expansions and spinoffs, including the MechWarrior, MechCommander and MechAssault series.
Strong Reception
“We’ve been amazed at the audience’s reception and the audience’s outpouring of support in every way,” Jordan said during a recent Q&A on No Guts No Galaxy’s Twitch channel. “We’re really excited and awfully scared of the work we have yet to do, because this is the end of the Kickstarter, but the beginning of development.”
Some more of the campaign’s final numbers: The Kickstarter raked in 41,733 backers, and including additional PayPal pledges, they raised a total of $2,865,422. They hit their initial $250,000 funding goal in less than an hour, and they raised $1 million in less than a day. On social networks, the community amassed more than 25,000 Facebook page likes, over 4,000 announcement shares on Facebook, and another 12,000 followers on Twitter and 2,000 announcement retweets.
Campaign Strategy
The campaign was structured into four funding stages: The base skirmish game, a single-player story campaign, an expanded mercenary campaign and PVP multiplayer. The last stage was unlocked at $2.5 million a day before the campaign’s end.
Backer rewards included digital copies of the game, exclusive backer-only content and sub-forums, the chance to help create mercenary characters in the game as well as characters in an original novel, and more.
Additional “Backer Missions” kept backers engaged and spreading the word on social media in order to unlock rewards like livestream Q&As with the developers, specific in-game content and an original full-length novel by veteran BattleTech author Michael E. Stackpole.
This is Harebrained Scheme’s fourth successful Kickstarter project. Two were for video games based on the Shadowrun franchise; they each raised more than $1 million in funding from more than 20,000 backers. The other campaign, Golem Arcana, a tabletop miniatures system that connects with smart mobile devices.
