Gamefound announces exclusives! An interview with Alex Radcliffe.
On 5/30/2023 Gamefound released a blog written by Alex Radcliffe, the CMO of Gamefound directed mostly to game companies but visible to anyone. In this article it is announced that Gamefound is now in partnerships with Archon Studio, Corvus Belli, Flatout Games, Geeknson, Open Owl Studios, and Van Ryder Games to exclusively use Gamefound’s Pledge Manager feature for their campaigns.
In addition, the article also goes over high level changes to their system, mostly for the backend which has reportedly been cumbersome to use according to several spoken to developers, publicly seen by Creative Game Studios shipping/SKU issues and from first hand experience of myself having seen the system alongside a creator.
Much of this had to do with it being two fairly different systems that shared some things and not others. One system was for when launched a game on Gamefound and then used it as your pledge manager. It already had all of your SKU data ready.
But when using Gamefound only has a pledge manager after running a campaign elsewhere (such as Kickstarter) you’d need to import your data which could be cumbersome and prevented all features from being available to you.
This is supposedly now much more streamlined and is a positive step for Gamefound to take. Every creator will benefit from this, as will consumers with more accurate information and less bugs brought in from bad data.
The scope of this deal is only for the pledge manager and not
Of note is the timing of this announcement. On My 18th, 2023 Kickstarter announced and exclusive partnership with Steamforged Games who will bring four new projects to Kickstarter, one of those being Monster Hunter World Iceborne.
However, I had some questions about this exclusive deal so I reached out to Alex Radcliffe who was very gracious and open with answer my questions as best he could without giving away too many specifics around the deal(s) which would prove inappropriate. Below is my questions along with his answers, trimmed to be more efficient and to the point.
How long is this deal?
Varies by company and I haven’t confirmed what they’re comfortable saying, they are generally shorter, in the range of 2 years. But I’ll keep it general because I don’t know which creators mind.
What is the benefit for these companies to sign on to be exclusive and is it open to more who want to sign up (assuming the benefits are enticing)? Is it cash incentive? Priority support? Custom code work? Premium ad space? Something else?
Again I’ll keep it somewhat vague because of the nature of the companies, but the idea of the exclusivity is that it allows us to offer certain perks to the creators which benefits them, and in return we don’t have to worry about chasing or keeping their business quite as much which benefits Gamefound, and ideally customers benefit. So for example, if we gave a creator a lower rate, they have lower margins and whether or not that gets passed onto the customer in any way we can’t control…but at the very least I know that people were concerned when GF raised rates that customers would carry that burden…and this at the very least removes some of that pressure.
I saw Rick from CGS was wondering why they aren’t part of it so they may be interested in signing up.
Rick we’re actually reaching out to…we saw that as well and I’m not sure how he was missed. As far as the actual benefits, I can’t go into specifics for the obvious reason that it opens a rabbit hole of people wondering why they were or weren’t chosen, and could cause tensions. What I will say, is that clients with higher volume we inherently are more incentivized to “lock in” and not have to chase them. Sometimes that might be a price conversation, other times a feature conversation, extra marketing etc. I can’t comment on specifics only generalities.
Have you thought of getting exclusivity for campaign not just pledge manager in response to Kickstarter and the SFG deal?
We would love to lock in exclusivity for campaigns but we don’t heavily push it. We want creators to feel open to trying us, and not feel it’s a locked in decision. It might be something we explore more one day but I’m unsure.
Ending the conversation, Alex informed me that they are open to anyone that might be interested in joining but that it’d most likely only really be viable for creators that hold multiple campaigns within the ~2 year time period.
So, what do you think? Will exclusives like these and the one with SFG continue to rise and if so, is that good for consumers? Let me know!