When we ran our Shrink Wrap IndieGoGo project last year it was all about enhancing The Game Crafter service based upon features that were heavily requested. This year we decided we wanted to try to get game buyers more involved, so we did a game-oriented Village in a Box Kickstarter campaign. Our plan was to mix in stretch goals that would also enhance the service, because people have been requesting that we do exactly that. However, quite a few game buyers were not at all thrilled with that idea.
It didn’t matter that those extra stretch goals weren’t replacing game related stretch goals. It didn’t matter that we were using our own money to fund those stretch goals, not the money earned from the Kickstarter. If it wasn’t related to the kickstarter, they didn’t want it as part of the campaign. To me personally, this seemed like the folks who complain about their taxes going to pay this or that because it doesn’t personally affect them at this very moment. They don’t care about the greater good.
We had originally planned 10 such stretch goals.The idea was that unlike our campaign last year, these would be things we’d bring out at some point, but that the more we raised during the campaign, the faster we’d bring them out and release them into the community. We stopped posting these stretch goals after 3. It’s possible that we caved to the vocal minority, but in our experience there’s 10 people thinking it for every 1 that’s vocal about it. So better to be safe than sorry.
So when planning your stretch goals, be mindful of how your backers or potential backers will interpret them. Make sure they are things that the vast majority will see as positive adds. If it’s something that you think some folks will complain about, perhaps it needs to be a reward that individuals can choose to back instead of a stretch goal.
Comments
ViaB Stretch Rewards
Well I can't speak for the community but I think the Stretch Goals in the ViaB Kickstarter campaign were VERY RELEVANT and useful additions to most of the 10 games! Things like extra cards, sturdier box stock, the tiles and the chits, etc.
All seemed like logical expansions to the various games!
So from my perspective I think The Game Crafter (TGC) did a wonderful job working with the independent designer community to offer interesting and unique expansions to the various TGC games.
In some ways some of those expansions may be unique add-ons that will never be made available to other people. This may or may not be true, because some of the games might include the extra cards at a later time, they still took effort to design and care to make the base game EXPANDED with these nice extras.
All I can comment is that TGC has been great in processing my orders in a timely fashion, the cards are good quality and the service is excellent. I'm certain backers of the ViaB campaign will also echo my sentiments when fulfilling their order!
The only thing I would add that could be of interest is stronger/thicker box stock for things like the Medium boxes or Tuck boxes... That stretch reward would be interesting for all the games out there (including prototypes)...
Thanks
Thanks for the feedback! We appreciate it. :)