Kickstarter backer tiers: feedback and more ideas, please!

[ewokonfire]

What I'd really like to see is tiers which unlock expansions in the future (even if it was broken up into tiers offering 1 expansion, 2 expansions...), I'd consider throwing a fair bit of money at the campaign if I knew I was getting X expansions and the base game, even for a small discount.

The problem with this is that it would then tie Arcen down into making X expansions, which they may not end up wanting to.  In addition, what if they do another mini-expansion like CoN?  Would it count?  Offering people things that you've barely even thought about just has too many problems.

[z99-_]

Just out of curiosity, what specifically is the sticking point for physical rewards? For custom apparel, it seems like there are quite a few sites that do that now, so I would expect you could find at least one where all you have to do is design the clothing and send them the shipping list.

For the record, I would easily donate an extra $50 if I could get a "Make Arcen Great Again" baseball cap.

[Tridus]

Just out of curiosity, what specifically is the sticking point for physical rewards? For custom apparel, it seems like there are quite a few sites that do that now, so I would expect you could find at least one where all you have to do is design the clothing and send them the shipping list.

For the record, I would easily donate an extra $50 if I could get a "Make Arcen Great Again" baseball cap.

Fulfilment is massively expensive. Shipping costs are complicated to sort out. Making any kind of profit on it requires very high pledge numbers, and it tends to draw staff time away from the game part. There's sites that help with this, but there's no way to get around the costs involved.

You're seeing a lot less of it these days because of that. A lot of early kickstarters promised tons of physical stuff and *lost* money trying to get it all delivered, not to mention all the effort that was devoted to that instead of to the game.

[Draco18s]

For a point of reference, making a custom Tshirt would cost the Kickstarter $10 to $12 a shirt.  Say it's attached to a given pledge level +$20 (would you pay more than $20 for a t-shirt?).  That leaves $8 for shipping, which in the US for a t-shirt is easily $4.  International will vary between $10 and $30.

So you ship the shirt in the US for $4, leaving $4 minus Kickstarter fees (for a +$20 pledge that works out to $2), for additional project funds.

Wow. $2.

[chemical_art]

For a point of reference, making a custom Tshirt would cost the Kickstarter $10 to $12 a shirt.  Say it's attached to a given pledge level +$20 (would you pay more than $20 for a t-shirt?).  That leaves $8 for shipping, which in the US for a t-shirt is easily $4.  International will vary between $10 and $30.

So you ship the shirt in the US for $4, leaving $4 minus Kickstarter fees (for a +$20 pledge that works out to $2), for additional project funds.

Wow. $2.

Plus a 12$ shirt will NOT look good in the small run that the kick starter will use.

[Draco18s]

(Also, yes, custom printed shirts really are that expensive. When we KS'd Velociraptor! Cannibalism! we looked into it)

[kasnavada]

For a point of reference, making a custom Tshirt would cost the Kickstarter $10 to $12 a shirt.  Say it's attached to a given pledge level +$20 (would you pay more than $20 for a t-shirt?).  That leaves $8 for shipping, which in the US for a t-shirt is easily $4.  International will vary between $10 and $30.

So you ship the shirt in the US for $4, leaving $4 minus Kickstarter fees (for a +$20 pledge that works out to $2), for additional project funds.

Wow. $2.

Plus a 12$ shirt will NOT look good in the small run that the kick starter will use.

Also, the manpower to get everyone's addresses, to care for the wrongly written addresses, to care for returns, to call the distributor and arrange everything. All of that takes time during which Arcen's not paid. If you want to make money out of making t-shirts, you'd need a "profit" per t-shirt of at least 5 dollars, possibly more if there is few t-shirts. Given the small timeframe that Arcen set itself to make AI war 2, that would mean an additional person, probably, to care for t-shirts.

It's certainly doable, but worth it ?

A simpler idea would have to strike a deal with those websites that sell t-shirts directly. You give them images, they sell the stuff, and make it so it's completely unrelated to the kickstarter.

[Tridus]

Has there been any talk about stretch goals? That could be a place to put some popular game modes or plots that can't make the base design but also don't have a technical reason why they should wait for 2.0 (unlike say space platforms, which are a good idea but a major departure in how stuff works at the core, rather than an optional addition).

Stuf like Astro trains and fallen spire are what I'm thinking of, that people like but that probably won't make the cut for the base goal. 

I know more music was mentioned, that's a good one too.

[tadrinth]

Stretch goals for new features would all be post-1.0 to avoid having to push the release date out and to reduce risk. They'd either be DLC or ongoing updates.

[Tridus]

Yeah, I don't think that's a problem if it's said up front. We don't need a Bloodstsined style "hey thinks for the money, now we are a year behind schedule" announce,net.

[kasnavada]

Stretch goals for new features would all be post-1.0 to avoid having to push the release date out and to reduce risk. They'd either be DLC or ongoing updates.

Or hire another guy to work fulltime on the project. It could be an issue on a bigger studio because the difference on mappower wouldn't change much when you've got a 50 person team, but here it's a 4 man team. A 5th guy / gal could accelerate the release by a lot.

[Cinth]

A 5th guy / gal could accelerate the release by a lot.

Not really.  I'll point out my involvement with Raptor here and remind you that the game was still delayed due to other things at the time.  Adding me helped relieve some of the bottleneck but there was still a bottleneck. 

[z99-_]

That's about what I expected the price to be, maybe a little higher. I suppose the question that changes things for me is "would you pay more than $20 to buy a t-shirt?", and in some situations, the answer is yes. As an example, life is currently going good enough where I was planning on giving $150. Last time I checked, the closest tier was $100, but oh well. I briefly looked at the $250 tier (next one up), but nothing there really excited me, so I didn't think any more about it. But now, thinking 'would I go to $250 if it had a t-shirt', the answer is a possible yes.

Of course, typing it out, paying $100 for a t-shirt sounds ridiculous. But that's how people shop! If you look at the two situations separately, 'would I pay $$$ for a thing I really like' and 'would I pay $$$ for multiple things I sort of like', the answer to both could be no; but evaluated together, 'would I pay $$$ for a thing I really like and multiple things I sort of like, the answer may be yes.

All that being said, it still might not be worth it. The group of people like me who both are really excited by physical rewards, and have the money to pay the higher price could be pretty small. It would take someone with a head for business to figure out the number of people expected in tier w/o shirt, the number of people expected in tier w/ shirt, the profit form every person who moves from 'w/o' to 'w/', and the losses from everyone who were already going to donate to 'w/' even if it didn't come with a shirt, to figure out if it would be viable. My only thought is, in some situations it might be.

TL/DR: Never underestimate people's ability to rationalize throwing money away

PS: Is there a tutorial for posting? Once I was done typing my lengthy response the first time, I tried to quote Draco18s and ended up deleting everything I had written, which was more than I have now (maybe that's intentional to keep posts from getting too long )

[Captain Jack]

PS: Is there a tutorial for posting? Once I was done typing my lengthy response the first time, I tried to quote Draco18s and ended up deleting everything I had written, which was more than I have now (maybe that's intentional to keep posts from getting too long )

Thanks for typing it up again, even after that.  I don't think written text is deleted when you quote from the reply screen, unless you highlighted your own post. I make a point of writing longer responses in word but I was messing around with the "Quote selected" function in this reply and didn't see it happen.

You actually made a good point about tiers though: we want to match up backers willingness to donate to our tiers, which means we should have regularly spaced out tiers from $20 to $300-$400 or so, and then start the larger jumps for big spenders. What do you think could go into those tiers?

[z99-_]

It wasn't directly >hit 'quote selected' >delete everything, more like >hit 'quote selected' >nothing seems to happen >see if copy/pasting comment in makes it quote >see it doesn't >highlight pasted comment >hit backspace >delete everything. I'm sure it was just noobness on my part, not a bug.

The problem with the tiers is, there's already trouble finding stuff to fill the low tiers; how then can the upper tiers be filled with meaningful, unique rewards? That's another reason physical rewards are nice: they allow for a lot more variability. Once again, I get that in most situations they wouldn't be profitable, just saying.

Maybe there could be two separate groups of Mk I-V forum badges/whatever? Like how steam badges separate between normal and foil, you could have tiers with Mk I/II/III/IV/V, then Shiny Mk I/II/III/IV/V. The 'Shiny' would probably be replaced with something more interesting. It's not much, but if we really can't think of anything else to create extra tiers with . . .