http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1744629938/mars-attacks-the-miniatures-game

Ok, it looks really cool.. but I dont get, 13 minutes and 50K (now over 300K, still 28 days to go))? I cant even find viral marketing or anything..

Its amazing, only 2000 backers, most went for buying the game and stuff backing 300$ !. Jeez, most backing was for 300$!!

(at least backs with pledges, why they dont show the overall backing %?)

Whats going on? What kind of sorcery they are using to get all that money so fast?

Is "Mars Attack" theme full of fanatic fans?

One thing that people selling online through a third party will do is buy their own stuff through that third party. So if I sell something on Steam I might have all my employees buy a copy of that item through Steam to get it to show up on the top sellers list or at least somewhere slightly higher when someone sorts by popularity. Similarly if I already had some funding or potential funding and wanted to kick start my kick starter I might have employees make my product look more impressive by contributing to my kick starter. In either case most of the money comes back to me and the share that the third party gets can be written off as marketing expenses. I don't know that's what happened here, but it's something to keep in mind when you see something with large volumes on open. It could be real or it could be a marketing ploy.

You might also note that they were the creators of Dreadball whose Kickstarter campaign also exhibited large numbers i.e. 728k of a 20k goal

edit: Of further interest - a list of the top ten funded board games - it would seem the numbers are not small for this genre.

I was looking at their site and saw a bunch of really successful kickstarters.

I think they are using kickstarter differently.

Instead of making a game, putting it on sale, and hope for success, they create a kickstart project, so ppl give then enought money both for making the game and buying it already. So its better because they dont have risk of expending money with no return. They will do just as much as ppl ask..

Or not..does it makes sense?

Mars Attack was a movie during the 90's I believe, I would say millions of people have heard of it. Kickstarter is as much about name recognition as it is about the project itself.. Look at the rise of the Kickstarter developer celebrity like Chris Roberts Star Citizen or Double Fine Tim Schafer.. etc. Also with Kickstarter it allows small underserved segments of the community ( be it gaming or other ) to endorse their own niche industry, in this case tactical movie branded board games..

Those $300 pledges is some kind of "New York Comic Con edition", I'm guessing they were very successful with their IRL advertising at that event.

Very Impressive.

If you like to see a breakdown of its kickstarter stats check out Kicktraq here. Its trending to between $800k and $1.4million

At first glance gaining $170k on its first day looks a bit suspicious, particularly when you factor in its avg pledge vs backers ($38,000 vs 200).

However digging a little deeper reveals over 1300 backers in the first day and judging by the 600 backers in the $300 reward ($195k) I'd say its pretty clear that these guys have a very strong and loyal core following that are actively watching the company negating the need for heavy amount of promotion, at least for day 1 kickstarter. I think this is probably backed up by the fall in both backers and pledges for almost a week afterwards, at which point it raises again no doubt due to some form of marketing.

Overall it just goes to show how important it can be to have a fan base for your product/company and that maintaining their respect can provide huge benefits such as seen here. I also suspect its the type of market that really plays up to fans and fan support, not to mention that board games themselves have been under going a revival of late and have always been popular.

Of course it should also be noted that whilst it is a large amount of pledge money, the basic game itself is costing $75 so its not exactly a cheap product so it would be expected that the money raised would be high.