I am all for creating, collecting and selling swag but I would rather have more of the backers' money go into actual game development and not be spent on tee shirts, mouse pads, etc. Now, we can easily address the shipping cost, but unless we want to really have a high margin on the goods, if a large percentage of our backers choose our physical tiers instead of our digital ones, a much lower percentage of the total pledged would be available for the game's development. This means that instead of every $1 that is collected for a digital reward staying with the studio, a large percentage will leave. Additionally, they have to be delivered to the players through either a third-party fulfillment house and/or the mail system. However, the physical goods tiers proved to be a bit more challenging than our digital ones simply because we'll need to have many of the items manufactured by other companies. There are also many other interesting items some of these came from suggestions from the community, others from my private discussions with people outside as well as from within our studio. Another tier allows the backer to do some voice-work for our game, and others come with a discount on subscription pricing.
For example, one of our packages comes with a miniature hand-painted by our team. As part of my internal and external consultations and discussions, we have put some items into our tiers that are reasonably unusual, and even unique.
Doing what everybody else is doing isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I wanted to differentiate us from some of the others as long as doing so would be a win-win situation for CSE and our backers. I also decided it was crucial to have some truly different pledge tiers with our Kickstarter, as well as certain tiers that meant something to me personally. Instead, I decided to go to the next level by using a Founder's Points system that will let our backers flesh out the already-loaded tiers by choosing their personal favorites from a large selection of optional items that will only be available in our in-game store. Now, I wasn't content to simply shave a few bucks off the pledges and just leave it at that. As part of my due diligence, I put spreadsheets together from the tiers of other projects and compared them to what I intended to offer to ensure that our pledge tiers should always be seen favorably. In the case of CU, I wanted to go even farther by having possibly the most generous program of any Kickstarter game. From my first MUD ( Aradath) through to March On Oz™, I have resisted the sirens' call of ham-handed monetization and/or of charging players for services that really should be included with the purchase of a game, let alone ones that should come standard with a subscription-based game. As anyone who has played my games over the years can attest, I have never been interested in treating customers as just walking wallets or ATMs. One goal I settled on right away was that I wanted our tiers to be generous as a way of thanking our backers for making a collective $2M bet on our studio. This isn't a simple task for a variety of reasons, since the MMORPG player audience is both large and diverse, composed of different people with a wide range of preferred play styles, individual preferences and very distinct wants/needs. In this regard, the first thing I had to do was figure out what my core goals for our Kickstarter's reward structure would be, and then determine how best to implement them. The time and effort I've put in have still been worthwhile since they have given me a good learning experience even though I'm not sure my eyes will ever recover from all the recent spreadsheet work. I didn't think it would be quick and easy by any means, but it turned out to be considerably more involved than I'd expected. Dev Diary – Gaming the Kickstarter Reward Tiersĭesigning the reward tiers for our upcoming Kickstarter campaign has been a very interesting process.
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