How Last Light 2nd Edition Raised $653,664 on Gamefound

Mark Pecota | CEO at LaunchBoom

Launching a 4X space game that plays in under an hour seemed impossible.

But this team not only did it once—they did it again with Last Light 2nd Edition, raising over $650,000 on Gamefound.

Here’s their story.

Mike Boseak

Meet Mike Boseak, the Marketing Director at Grey Fox Games.

Since 2014, Grey Fox Games has been creating standout board games. But with the market more crowded than ever, they needed something truly unique.

That’s when they collaborated with game designer Roy Cannaday to bring an innovative game to market, Last Light.

Last Light is a groundbreaking 4X space game. If you’re not familiar with 4X games, they typically involve eXploring, eXpanding, eXploiting, and eXterminating and they usually take hours to play.

But Last Light delivers the full 4X experience in under an hour. That means you get all the strategy and excitement without spending an entire evening on one game.

This was a game-changer.

Now, with the 2nd Edition, they made it even better. They listened to player feedback and fine-tuned the game to enhance the gameplay experience.

Mike knew they had something special, but having a great game wasn’t enough. They needed a powerful marketing strategy to make sure Last Light 2nd Edition stood out.

That’s when Mike and Grey Fox Games joined forces with my team at LaunchBoom to implement a new pre-launch strategy – one focused on building an email list of superfans before their campaign even began.

On January 30, 2024, they hit the launch button on Gamefound. Within 24 hours, they’d raised over $200,000. By the end of the campaign, that number had skyrocketed to $653,664 from 4,437 backers.

This wouldn’t have been possible without this new pre-launch strategy.

Let’s dive into what that was.

Last Light’s pre-launch marketing strategy

Making over $200K in one day is no small feat. It was largely possible because Mike understood the value of pre-launch marketing. And not just any pre-launch marketing, but building an email list of superfans before he launched. Here’s how he did it.

1. Last Light drove traffic with Meta Ads

Meta ads are the first step to build a pre-launch email list. This is how Last Light drove traffic. They tested many different variations of copy and imagery, but here was their best performing ad.


2. Last Light collected email addresses on a landing page

The landing page is where they explained their product and collected email addresses. The landing page looked like this:

By the way, this is a screenshot from our LaunchKit software that all LaunchBoom Creators get access to.


3. Last Light collected $1 reservations

This is an optional step that creators can take if they want to understand who on their email list is most likely to buy. It requires creating a “VIP Offer” where you give something valuable to the backer in exchange for a deposit in the pre-launch.

Here was their VIP offer:

  • An exclusive bonus alien faction “The Experiment”

The most important thing to know is that people who put down the reservation were way more likely to buy.


Last Light got funded on day one

Leading into the launch, Mike had 2,214 people who had put down a $1 reservation deposit. We’ve found that “number of reservations” is one of the best predictors of how successful a launch will be. And just as predicted, the campaign took off.

On the first day, they made over $200k.

By the end of the campaign, they had driven $653,664 in revenue from 4,437 new customers.

This was all possible because they followed the LaunchBoom system, which is laser focused on getting creators the highest return on their investment.

Because at LaunchBoom, our goal is not to launch a successful product, but to launch a successful business.

And Mike was pretty happy with the results.

Want Even More Details?

Check out this Masters of Crowdfunding podcast we recorded with Mike.


Do you have an innovative game like Mike?

We can help you turn it into a real business (or dramatically grow your existing business).

We’ve worked with over a thousand product creators.

If you want to be the next one…

Click here to talk with a LaunchBoom expert.

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