Nate Chatellier and Manny Trembley are the founders/owners of Mind Bottling Games. MBG had a massive campaign for their first game Dice Throne. Nate and Manny take us through those campaigns, FB ads, Comic Book Kickstarters vs Board Game Kickstarters, and the future of Dice Throne.
Q&A: Nate Chatellier, Manny Trembley
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Eduardo Baraf is a game maker from Mountain View, California. He is married with two boys (5/8) and loves playing games with his family and friends at home. He owns Pencil First Games (Lift Off! Get me off this Planet, The Siblings Trouble, GemPacked Cards) and runs the YouTube channel: Edo’s Game Reviews. Professionally his career spans Video Games, Startups, and VR technology.
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3 Readers Commented
Join discussionA very key element of Facebook ads is to make sure you pick only a couple countries to promote your ad too. It’s VERY common that Asian and 3rd world countries are riddled with click banks that just eat up all your $. KS backers for indie hobby games it’s best to concentrate on USA, EU, Canada. and Australia (pretty much in that order). You can view an existing project’s “Community” tab that is similar to your desired audience and see this data yourself.
Great comment, James. I completely agree.
For those curious, here’s the math for us:
$30,000 (roughly 650 backers)
– $2,700 (9% ks fee)
– $4,648 (manufacturing costs)
– $4,550 (rough out of pocket shipping costs since we subsidized a portion of their costs)
– $10,000 (ad spend)
= $8,102
Also, this doesn’t include the immeasurable snowball / word of mouth effect or that our manufacturing costs for everyone went down because of the added backers.
But in any case, for us, this was definitely a net financial gain. And significantly more important to us than the financial gain, was the user acquisition. We strongly believe in our product and have *many* plans for the future of Dice Throne. So even if we ended up just breaking even, this was money very well spent purely because of our business model for the game (not necessarily the case for other content creators).
Still, YMMV and FB ads are *not* for everyone and I don’t think some projects should run them at all. But I’m certainly glad we did =D