Kickstarter backer tiers: feedback and more ideas, please!

[kasnavada]

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?

Not sure anything needs to, but that would indeed be a cool idea.
If I recall well, Chris stated that sales figures where in the millions for AI war. Which I imagine is the sum of individual expansion sales + base game sales - still makes for hundred of thousands. So 10 thousands backer ain't out of reach, at least I hope.

[Cyborg]

Suggestions:

Early access needs to be a carrot beyond the $20 sell.

$15/$20 for the base game, early bird special. Totally agree.
$30 public early access (let's call it beta, since people understand that terminology)
$50 Earlier than early access (let's call it alpha)
$60 and $70, I can't spot the difference.

Please keep in mind that most KS tiers are cumulative. You are typing all this out including rewards from previous tiers, which makes it hard to understand the difference between them.

[z99-_]

Looking at the document again, it seems if most of the TBD stuff became real there would probably be enough variety. Also, why are the limits so low? I get that to some extent you can't let 100 people donate $5000 and bog the game down for 15 years while Pablo writes all of the music, but surely if 10 people wanted to donate that much and we get a full soundtrack that would be fine? Just as one example.

[kasnavada]

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.

As I know nothing of your involvement, capabilities, role on the project or anything, then no clue why this particular situation didn't help, nor why you're pointing to it. From what I've read and seen you do (SBR and AI war 2), we have very different values when stuff needs to be done. Not that it matters.

However, what I said came from 10 years of working in development in different roles... and yes, adding someone else to reduce workload, and time, works. However, I'll agree that not always : there are conditions for it to work.

In my experience, main points are that the right profile has to be found (the newbie must be able to take over, or liberate, someone working on the bottleneck), workload prevision need to be are adequately defined, scope must not change from start to finish, or only "minor-ly" (a point on which video gaming as a whole has issues) and whatever project you're working on needs to be cut and cuttable into independant pieces, so work can be divided properly, and small size of team. More people mean more communication channels and lost time - again "cutting" scopes into independant pieces must be done.

Hence why I said "A 5th guy / gal could". Because sometimes, that's the solution. Other times, it's a waste of time.

[NickAragua]

What, no "pay to help out with fixing bugs" tier?

[Pumpkin]

What, no "pay to help out with fixing bugs" tier?

I guess pre-release is basically that.

[Tridus]

Early access, and earlier than early access. There's no tier without that.

[emphy]

You may want to combine the kickstarter tiers with the earlier games.

I remember, from a very long time ago, introversion software sold packages of Prison Architect alpha access with their earlier games included.

If you want to be devious put ai war: fleet command in the $5 tier. If newcomers to the game like it enough they may just buy the dlc pack.

[Captain Jack]

You may want to combine the kickstarter tiers with the earlier games.

I remember, from a very long time ago, introversion software sold packages of Prison Architect alpha access with their earlier games included.

If you want to be devious put ai war: fleet command in the $5 tier. If newcomers to the game like it enough they may just buy the dlc pack.

That is a very good idea. Seconding.

[x4000]

You may want to combine the kickstarter tiers with the earlier games.

I remember, from a very long time ago, introversion software sold packages of Prison Architect alpha access with their earlier games included.

If you want to be devious put ai war: fleet command in the $5 tier. If newcomers to the game like it enough they may just buy the dlc pack.

That is a very good idea. Seconding.

I actually just took out the AI War Classic stuff from the tiers in general, because I realized that I'd be basically giving those away without any royalties going to folks that are owed them for that game.  It makes giving away copies of older games a real challenge, unless the only people pulling royalties on them are also pulling royalties on the new game, which is not the case.

[Draco18s]

If you did it as an addon ("$5 gets you AI War 1!" or however much) you could calculate it when doing Backerkit rewards.  The $5 would be the portion that'd be subject to royalties and you'd have an accurate count.

But yeah, totally understandable.

[Billick]

This may be just me, but I personally dislike the idea of paying extra for early access.  As a rule, I don't do it.  This kind of locks me into the $15-20 tier.

[Tridus]

If you did it as an addon ("$5 gets you AI War 1!" or however much) you could calculate it when doing Backerkit rewards.  The $5 would be the portion that'd be subject to royalties and you'd have an accurate count.

But yeah, totally understandable.

Backerkit would be the place to do that instead of Kickstarter, specifically because you can do addons seperate from the main tier so easily. Good call.

I'm not sure it's really necessary, though. It's pretty easy to just go buy AI War Classic if you want to.

[Dominus Arbitrationis]

Backerkit would be the place to do that instead of Kickstarter, specifically because you can do addons seperate from the main tier so easily. Good call.

I'm not sure it's really necessary, though. It's pretty easy to just go buy AI War Classic if you want to.

If my knowledge of how it all works is correct, BackerKit is essentially just an addon to Kickstarter. So you host your project on KickStarter, then use BackerKit to process backers and all that.

Anyways, the point is to make it as easy for the end customer as possible. Which, in this case, would be offering AIWC from the KS menu so that they don't have to go to some other site and deal with another payment screen and get frustrated at how annoying it all is just to get a game.

[Aklyon]

$30 public early access (let's call it beta, since people understand that terminology)

People do not understand what beta means at this point. They'll assume its anywhere from 'working but not finished (an actual beta)' to 'prerelease version, but pretty much the same thing' (a AAA beta) to 'not actually a beta but we haven't removed the word from it yet'.

Early access isn't much better, but it at least still has a distinction from full releases.