Start paid ads 6–8 weeks before your Kickstarter launch date. Any later and you don't have enough runway to build the audience you need. Any earlier and you're spending budget on followers who'll lose interest before you go live.

A realistic paid ads budget for an indie game Kickstarter starts at £500–£1,000 for pre-launch and scales from there based on your funding goal, timeline, and how aggressively you want to grow.

Ghost Vanguard started with a small but dedicated following online. Launching paid ads, a Discord community and a demo secured them over $35,000 in funding and over 10,000 additional wishlists.

Discover why paid advertising is essential for Kickstarter game campaigns. Learn how ads build followers, drive backers, and amplify every channel.

Most campaigns don’t fail because the game is bad. They fail because nobody told enough of the right people it exists — and the ones who found it weren’t convinced. Key takeaways Positioning is your first conversion tool. Before anyone backs your game, they need to understand it, and feel something about it (genre, style, art, characters) and you only have a few seconds to land that with a first impression. Authenticity isn’t a vibe. It’s a strategy. Players back people the

Launching your video game on Kickstarter can be an exciting time and with a pre-launch campaign, what better way to get the hype going!