The advice is out there for anyone starting a crowdfunder for their self-published game:

1. Meticulously plan out how much money you need in order to deliver. Make sure you include payment for yourself, because, after all, you're worth it.
2. Write that number down.
3. Divide it by some amount.
4. Divide it by even more.
5. Think of the largest number you can. Divide by that too.
6. That's your new funding goal. If you get people to promise you that much money, then you need to produce the game that you were thinking of when you did step 1.

Sure, it might look like you're at risk of promising your backers a product that you have nowhere near enough budget to actually produce. If you're a coward! But you won't have to worry about that! Since you set your goal as a tiny fraction of the actual budget you need, you're going to fund, like, so fast. Before you even know it. At least, it better be within the first 48 hours, because we all know that no one makes anything except in the first two and last two days.

Once you put that little banner on the corner of your cover image that says how fast you funded, that's when the real money starts rolling in. People love to back a winner, and if you haven't lost yet, then that's you! There are studies that show this! Just don't ask to see those studies! But now that the winner dividend is coming in, you might make the actual amount you need to produce your game and still pay rent.

Well...to produce your game plus all the stretch goals you promised between the listed goal and the real goal. Hopefully that's not too much, or hopefully the collaborators who said yeah, that sounds cool will think it's cool enough to cut you a deal. And if not, then you definitely need to start sending money to Mark Zuckerberg for ads on a website that's 90% populated with people who died in the Obama administration.

Anyway, don't worry about it. You've probably made enough to fulfill your orders, and probably on time. And if you're short on that...well, you're scrappy. You don't need to go out for coffee...you can skip lunch...plus the library has electricity and wifi, so you don't really need to pay those bills...just don't be late shipping your rewards, and make sure to post updates regularly, because if those backers don't hear from you every couple weeks, they might think you're rolling around in their hard-spent cash.

And whatever you do, do not doubt that this is the one true way to self-publish. If it works for a game company that has credit, established fan bases, lines of supporting products, staff...then why wouldn't it work for you?

Stop Doing This

Stop doing this, stop telling people to do this, stop expecting people to do this, stop creating excuses for this.

It's insane that this Business Secrets of the Pharaohs stuff gets shared around like it's self-evidently a good idea. It's more insane that the exact same people would share that and also breathlessly go on about tragically unfulfilled Kickstarter campaigns as if there isn't a direct causal link between the two most of the time.

Damb, that $800 budget to produce 1000 copies of a roleplaying game etched on Himalayan salt and delivered by horse carriage inside a gilded basalt sarcophagus failed to materialize? That's crazy and I sure hope they feel terrible, but I have no doubt that you can pull it off!

Worst Case Scenario

The same common wisdom that produces the advice above thinks of not hitting the goal as the failure state for a funding campaign. Don't hit the goal, don't get paid, lose out on the work you did ahead of the campaign and any money you sunk into promotion.

But it can be so much worse than that. Failing to hit your goal means all of that, but it also means you haven't taken anyone's money and you have no obligations. The absolute worst outcome of a funding campaign is to be on the hook for something you can't actually afford to deliver. And all of this common wisdom is setting people up to fall directly into that trap.

Here's a simple way to find your worst case scenario: find the reward tier that's the most expensive for you to actually produce. Divide your basic funding goal by the price of that tier. That's probably the worst situation you could end up in with a crowdfunding campaign (as long as your products and stretch goals aren't operating at a loss). It's the largest number of deliverables that could produce your minimum payout.

What is your plan if that happens? If your funding payout can't cover the costs at that point, you need to make sure you have other capital available. And if you do have other capital available, you need to actually want to spend it getting to zero on a project that's in the red.

You're probably not going to end up exactly in that spot, but if you know how you'll handle the worst outcome, then you'll be prepared for anything leading up to it.

But Everyone Does It

How bad an idea can this be if it seems to work for so many game publishers, though? Lots of companies do this; it's the primary business model for most of them. Why not emulate a practice that you've seen someone else raise millions of dollars doing?

There's a lot of reasons that should be obvious why this logic doesn't work. Most of those projects are from established publishers or creators that bring much more money, larger preexisting fanbases and professional connections to the table than a self-publisher does. The big one, though, is that game publishing companies exist to publish games, while you exist to be a human being.

Take a look at the most successful game Kickstarters you can think of and do that worst-case scenario calculation for them. If, somehow, Magpie Games had hit their $50,000 goal exactly and was on the hook to deliver 1000 copies of Avatar Legends, that would be a disastrous loss, but there's no doubt they could handle it. They'd cut back on production costs as much as possible, print fewer books than planned (but still more than 1000), cancel plans for supplements and plan their next funding campaign more conservatively, but in the end, they'd deliver books more or less as described to their thousand backers and have existing distribution contracts to sell the rest of the print run. After taking an initial loss, the project would likely end up in the black eventually.

This doesn't mean Magpie has vast resources; they're a pretty small company in the grand scheme of things. But Magpie is capitalized for the purpose of making games. If they run a crowdfunding campaign that isn't profitable unless it makes 1000% of it's goal, they absorb that risk by diverting capital from other games. If you do the same thing, you divert capital from a nice vacation, a new TV...food...rent...you get it. Or you don't divert capital and you don't deliver, and weirdos spend decades accusing you of incredibly baroque forms of fraud.

Why Bother

You'll probably notice that none of the people you see online telling you that you should put yourself into financial precarity are the ones who've actually done successful megaprojects. It's only ever people whose deep expertise comes from having backed a ton of crowdfunding projects. Inevitably, the time these people don't spend doling out ruinous business advice is spent loudly complaining about projects that have yet to deliver after having followed exactly the same advice. Weird.

Sometimes, you'll hear the people who actually have run big splash successes tell you that you're basically doomed as a self-starting creator. They believe the part about needing to set your goal so low you can't ever deliver with it, but they also recognize that it's a bad idea for anyone who can't take the hit, so they basically tell you not to try. That's certainly better advice, since no one's going to lose their home by following it, but it's a bit dismal to think that you're completely shut out from that option. It's also not realistic, because there definitely are self-publishers who raise money and deliver without destroying themselves.

A Secret Third Thing

This is a wild idea, but what if people started using crowdfunding platforms the way they advertise themselves to be used? Figure out how much money you need and ask people to give you that amount of money.

Doing this means you won't get to say you funded in an infinitesimal fraction of a second. You might be pushing and promoting your campaign until days before the deadline.
The percentage of your goal raised won't have four or five digits in it. If it doesn't have three digits in it, you won't get paid, but you also won't be obligated to produce something you can't afford.

When the project pays out, it doesn't matter if your goal was $1,000 and you hit 1000% of it, or if your goal was $10,000 and you hit 100% of it. You still made $10,000. The people dispensing Business Secrets of the Pharaohs will call the second project less successful, but if they'd ever had to pay printers, freelancers and shippers, they'd know that printers, freelancers and shippers don't see the digits that come before the % sign, they only see the ones that come after the $ sign.