Hello friends, and a happy Friday to one and all. I hope you have some good gaming or other adventures planned for the weekend (Myself, I will be curling tonight! Yes, the sport with the ice and the brooms and the stones). We're sneaking up on 300% funding and 1000 backers, which is pretty neat, so I wanted to share some of our crowdfunding strategies and philosophies with you all.

In the last update I made a little joke about "real" funding goals, and perhaps some folks are curious about what our own projections and thoughts were heading into this campaign. We've run many in the past for a variety of games with a wide variety of funding levels. Aegean Sea is a little bit of a niche game, albeit one that I think a lot of people will enjoy once they get to try it out. We set our goal low at $10,000, because that's a big chunk of what it'd cost to do a minimal print run of the game (2-3000 copies). 350 backers didn't seem like too much of a stretch, so we were pretty confident we'd get there. Our thoughts were that if we could get to $25000 (~800 backers) it'd be a good success, and the 1000-1500 backer range would be a great success. If we hit 2000 or more? That'd be amazing!

Having more backers on board gives us confirmation that the thing we think is cool *is* cool, and it also means that we can print more copies up front. Traditionally, the difference between a couple small print runs separated by half a year and one large print run hasn't been too large. You would get a modest break in the unit cost of the game, but nothing that's going to really move the needle. With shipping rates the way they are now, though, consolidating those two small runs into one large run (and thus, one boat trip) is actually quite significant! Having the confidence to create more copies in the first print run is a huge help (and for that we thank all our backers!) 

As you may have noticed, we've kept this campaign very simple. We have a game we enjoy, we want you to be able to pledge + lock in a copy that you'll receive before the mainstream release, and that's it! Aegean isn't really a game that lends itself to a bunch of different extra bits, gameplay or otherwise. We're also keeping things very simple with how we're advertising the game. We've used almost exclusively our direct reach of emails through our own list and BackerKit's help with all our past backers. Quite honestly, we don't feel excited about handing any dollars to Twitter right now, nor Facebook (okay Meta, whatever), and so during this campaign? We're not doing it! (Before the campaign, we did run a small test set of ads to generate some email signups/follows.)

But what about momentum? Oh no! The campaign will slow down and...dire consequences! In olden times, crowdfunding campaigns were a grind of slowly getting the word out, shouting to your socials hourly (people loved this, of course). Things have evolved - by sending out word to all our fans directly by email, we scooped up a much bigger group of people to back on the first day. So over the first week, we get about the same number of backers as we would have before, but most of them pop in on day 1-2. Is that worse? Nope! Just a different data curve. So don't worry if things look "slow". We're fine! We're happy with how many of you are already here on our adventures with Aegean Sea :)

What's next? In the absence of ads, we're going to be doing more streams next week instead! On Tuesday night, we'll be hosting another stream on our Twitch channel with Anya Combs, certified cool individual and crowdfunding expert. On Wednesday night, we'll be sneaking over to another channel to play another demo with friends, who even made a cool image:

They're also cool, but their certifications are still pending. Lots of red tape with coolness, you know.

Because time zones are a thing, a summary:
Tuesday Nov 1, 7PM Eastern / 4 Pacific - stream on twitch.tv/asmadigames
Wednesday Nov 2, 11PM Eastern / 8 Pacific - stream on twitch.tv/brain__in_a_jar 

Hope to see some of you there!

And of course, what update wouldn't be complete without a secret message just for our backers: