Two Big Kickstarters Concluded Today – ‘Massive Chalice’ And ‘Kickstarted’ – Did You Kick In?

It’s not terribly often that two (or more) major Kickstarters conclude their campaigns within hours of each other, but that’s what happened today. Often times, we give our dollars and they just kinda go on without us until we get the e-mail that they’re done and our bank accounts were charged. While it’s too late to chip in now, let’s go over and see what you may have missed! Disclosure: I’m running my own Kickstarter campaign at the moment and I backed both of these projects.

Double Fine’s Massive Chalice – Successful, $1.2m

Wow, it’s hard to believe it’s been a month since Double Fine’s second Kickstarter went up. Helmed by Brad Muir, the man with the most infectious smile in the world, the campaign got off to a much slower start than Tim Schafer’s own adventure project a little over a year ago, hitting goal in five days instead of two. Up front, there were a few things working against it: it was a second Kickstarter when the first game still hadn’t released; Brad Muir may be cool, but he’s no Tim Schafer; people may have lost the appeal of Kickstarting a concept without a lot of substance. By their own admission, they didn’t have a lot to present because the game’s creation (and subsequently, the art to go with it) hinged on winning Kickstarter funds. The post-success run was tamped down by the lack of stretch goals, which Muir didn’t have because the game was far too early to incorporate those. I believe him and it’s a noble thing to not pledge to specific content without knowing what the game looks like (I’m looking at you, SimCity), but it also meant that there was no explosive conclusion to the campaign as it reached its final ramp, winning well south of half the dollars of its predecessor, now called Broken Age and due out in September for a variety of platforms.

And now, our second big winner…

Kickstarted Documentary – Successful, $87k

This originally caught my eye when filmmakers Jason Cooper and Jay Arbitage interviewed Zach Braff for their documentary about his Kickstarter before launching a Kickstarter all their own. It’s confusing and a little tongue-in-cheek that a documentary about Kickstarters would elect to receive funding via Kickstarter, causing a number of hard hems and haws across the social media sphere. Jason hit me up not long before the campaign started for an interview and I knew their ambitions were noble. The duo already had a number of interviews in the can with people like Star Citizen‘s Chris Roberts and inXile’s Brian Fargo.

The campaign was a soft starter, but in their inquiries to get more projects included in their doc, they uncovered a scandalous Kobe Beef Kickstarter that was mere hours from conclusion. Kickstarter subsequently shut it down and while the Kickstarted guys enjoyed a wave of attention from their efforts, they were also slammed with bogus contributions from phantom contributors who would duck in and out with $10,000 donations (hence the spike around June 15th when funding trends would usually go in one direction only).

It still wasn’t quite enough to seal the deal though and as yuou see in the chart, a hefty outreach campaign came into play in the final days to get the film (legitimately) funded with only a few hours to go.