Yes, but that’s one of the major problems I have with Star Citizen. I don’t think Chris Roberts has done it intentionally or dishonestly, but the problem with his model is:
High pledges with high rewards unbalance players’ experience. Those that get the ability to name a planet or start off in the biggest ship are going to have a substantially better experience in the game, which doesn’t seem right to me.
They’ve now launched a market to allow people to buy several ships and trade them. Whilst this is working wonders for pledges, the wise clans will now be buying up massive fleets of ships that they’ll have at their command from the very start. Again, their clan’s experience, especially in PvP, is going to be significantly better than those that have not spent extra money.
I genuinely worry for that game now, especially given that I’ve put a fairly significant amount of money into its outcome. I want Chris Roberts to release a fantastic game, I want him to prove that we can revive the Sci-Fi Space Sim genre, if only because I loved playing Freelancer so much all those years ago.
@Topperfalkon - I would have to agree with both points. However, People pay for naming things in game whether it is a star system or just a planet. They sell.
Now, I am not saying that the I-Novae developers give the jump coordinates to that player so they are always safe or they can ambush their enemies from seemingly no where. On top of that there will be DLC right? So why not put the players who pledge this much into a DLC Pack since they are getting all the DLC anyway?
Just because stuff sells doesn’t mean you should sell it. Map packs sell, but look how well received they were by the CoD community. DLC shouldn’t ever include features that are available at launch, just locked away for certain users. As for preorders, I hate how the major publishers essentially make it necessary to blindly preorder games these days to feel like you’re getting the full package or the full experience.
So, yes, I-Novae could do these things and they would sell. But it’d be nice for a change to see a developer selling stuff in a more ethical manner. If you want to reward backers, give them physical rewards if you can afford it (I doubt IN can though), or give them cosmetic bonuses. Something similar to how Planetside 2 did it would be nice. I don’t mind a reward giving a bit of in-game currency provided it doesn’t put you too far ahead of everyone else, though I don’t know how much of a role IGC will play in I:B
Me too. Custom cosmetics are something I’d happily pay for. None of the ship styles seem to favour green hues, and I’d love to have a green hued skin, green thruster fire and contrails, and/or green blaster fire.
It’s been highlighted that the manufacturing and delivery costs of physical rewards can be quite significant and that many potential backers are not actually fussed about having them, so perhaps one option is to make them optional:
Instead of a pledge tier including a t-shirt or other physical item, a tier could unlock or give you a discount on that item in an I-Novae store which you could then buy if you wanted to.
This would mean I-Novae don’t waste a load of their funds sending t-shirts to people who don’t really care about them anyway.
Some items in the store could only be available to backers, or only to backers above a certain tier.
Bad idea? People that are interested in physical items, what do you think?
Thats a great idea. It needs to be enough transparent though to be “de-facto” a physical item. I can’t really tell if this would lower the incentive for people who want physicals to get the tier. I sure hope not.
A more sophisticated system would be to have something like a link to the store send to you after the Kickstarter. When the link is clicked it brings you to the shops shopping basket already filled with the goods included in the tier and the code allready entered.
Maybe Kickstarter even has that implemented. Or I’m sure T-Shirt Vendors like Jinx or ThinkGeek would be more then willing to cooperate on their web based platform.
Well I would like some physical items and this wouldn’t bother me. I was introduced to the idea of “discount” though trough a sentence and not a word or two in the tier tree of Kickstarter … I can’t really tell.
Anyway there should be a way for people to opt out on physicals without adding a ton of complicated tiers. Selling codes in the tiers wouldn’t violate the obligation of delivering the goods while still allowing for the, previously named, opting out.
Several projects have a website where if you use the same email address as your Kickstarter account then it can get your pledge level. As far as I can see Kickstarter doesn’t have a public API but there must be some way to get that data out.
Once you have that integration then discounts/unlocks can be applied automatically.
But yes, I agree that it needs to be clear that you’re not getting the item included and it needs to be easy to buy if you want to.
It should be clear that you get the item … IF you want to. That’s a little different.
I imagine a screen with all the physical items and checkboxes. Default they will be not crossed. You are promted to visit the website and select what you want. Though there could be other solutions.
Last time I “finalized” after a Kickstarter ended they had quite some sophisticated systems there … can’t remeber what Kickstarter used them and what exactly you could do.
Planetary Anahilation made me buy another 4 copies just because they asked me after the Kickstarter.
Perhaps convert the T-shirt tier to a “gift shop voucher”-tier, good for either a T-shirt (which costs INovae money), an additional free copy of the game (effectively zero up-front cost), or two beta-only keys to let your friends join you (effectively no cost at all)?
