Earth: After Death Kickstarter - A Post-Mortem

Hey all, morbid title aside, we wanted to reach out and just give a general statement on the Kickstarter's narrow failure to funding. It sucks, cuz it was REAL close. But as I said prior to other people: I'd rather it fail than barely fund. To summarize, here's why we believe the project didn't reach the goal or our expected funding amount:

1. Branding and Marketing - Hammer City Games is the new kid on the block in many ways: we're barely a year old and we haven't put out much in the way of original material consistently for a wide audience. Many other brand-new RPGs have the benefit of having worked hard over many years to put out free content, garner interest, and have word-of-mouth travel for their concepts. Earth: After Death may have been in development for a long while, but it's only within the past 8 months that marketing, reviews, and physical pre-release copies have found their way out of us.

2. Plus-Sized Product - The size of the project can be prohibitively expensive when combined with the previously mentioned problem. Backers (not you guys, but maybe) have no problem dropping $150 USD on a 5e supplement that seems cool or a monstrous 2nd edition to a pre-established brand. While our funding goal isn't egregious, $70 USD for a meaty 3-book package for a game that you've never heard of nor tested can be a risk that many consumers don't want to make. A quick google search to ask "is Earth: After Death any good?" giving no results can also make people wary of backing an untested project, regardless of who is part of its development.

3. Market Research - I know, I know, shitty excuse, but as a scientist, I take every failure as data, because as we say in the community: "all data is good data". The failure of this Kickstarter gives us marketing data as well as better insight as to how to market to the right people, and perhaps to tell us that the wider market isn't ready for a more long-term, Talk Shop kinda game (not to say that market isn't around, but the amount of OSR peeps vs. one-shot players is very skewed to smaller, more digestible games).

4. Video - I've never watched a single Kickstarter video when backing an RPG, but apparently Jellop didn't want to advertise for us because we didn't have a video. I guess we need one. Stupid reason, though.

All in all, this has been a learning experience, and while Earth: After Death is returning to the drawing board to refine it for the near future, we have many more plans on the horizon. This Q3 we will be launching a Kickstarter for the physical release of HyperMall: Unlimited Violence, a Cruelty Squad-inspired drug-trip of a game from JD Clement (see it here: https://rat-bastard-games.itch.io/hypermall-unlimited-violence). We also have 3pp supplements planned to get the HCG brand out there, including a follow-up to our 2023 hit Graveyard of the Gods, with other products for other systems planned.

Thank you all for your support, here's hoping we get it the second time around!