Phoenix Point is a highly anticipated turn based game for a reason - it's spearheaded by Julian Gollop, the man behind XCOM. Leaning on your fame is sometimes not enough though and that's why Snapshot Games invested $200.000 in marketing.
Snapshot Games initially aimed for a $500.000 crowdfunding target in order to commit to the project. That goal was quickly surpassed, as the backers on Fig pledged $938.077, almost doubling the initial goal. One might think it wasn't a good idea to Fig instead of Kickstart as the latter is more widely known in gaming culture as the go-to place for starting your games.
It turns out that Fig had better conditions for Phoenix Point to properly hatch, as the platform offers "investment funding" as well as "reward funding". The latter is the same funding format as on Kickstarter - you pledge some money and you gain game-related rewards for doing so, once it releases.
Investment funding allows people to actually invest into the game, and once it's released, they will get their money refunded, plus interest once the game goes live and Fig get their cut of revenue. This proved to be a great decision for Phoenix Point as more than half the funds were indeed from investment funding. Snapshot Games raised $484.000 in investment funding and $454.077 from reward funding.
The team didn't stop there though, as according to , Snapshot Games then kept the reward funding going through the Xsolla store that is still selling Phoenix Point pre-orders. Actual marketing only started at EGX when Snapshot Games hosted a 20 per cent discount and sales spiked.
Money was being thrown at them, so the team pushed for more marketing but didn't find any more success in the following months. According to David Kaye, Snapshot Games co-founder, the company then ran into lower marketing costs in January when the Xsolla store started showing spikes again.
Snapshot Games
The funds spent in marketing totalled to about $250.000, mostly focusing on events and social media, but it paid off as the store sold around $200.000 in Phoenix Point pre-orders, in July alone. In total, it has managed to gather around $1.2 million in revenue, resulting in the company having over $2 million in crowdfunding so far.
