8 games for $51: designing the JetGetters Kickstarter

After a loooong time in the works, we finally launched the JetGetters Kickstarter. A game about jumping out of jes, and landing on other jets. A multiplayer shooter where players fly high in the sky and hijack each other's vehicles midair. 

The concept is fairly new and can be compared the most to a hybrid of Just Cause 2 and Battlefield 4. It's openly inspired by those two games. The game design is pretty solid, since it's been in the works forever. The biggest challenge though was coming up with actual rewards that make sense for users, and create value. 

Initially we did the standard reward structure:

But then it quickly became boring. Everyone does the same thing. We definitely couldn't afford (logistics wise) to have physical goods since our fanbase is worldwide. For a while we had very special jets as rewards, something that'd be exclusive to Kickstarter backers to showoff in the game. It stayed there up until last minute. Got killed because it doesn't feel fair to everyone else, the playing field (even if it's costmetic wise) should be more or less fair for the whole user base. 

Is this gif cool or what?

I was excited about bundle ideas for a while. Always wanted to combine bundles with crowdfunding. However this is against Kickstarter's terms of use. All the rewards in your Kickstarter project _have_ to be produced by you as the creator. 

Eureka moment. We have a game portfolio (8 games including JetGetters now). We are either the developers or producers on them. Ran the idea via Kickstarter, green light. 

So we have 8 games, and can include them as a reward on Kickstarter. 

The second question is - how, at what price? 

We settled on the $100 tier reward for it as a standard price. 

This is what the rewards look like now:

See what we did there? The most valuable tiers have "50% off" options for first 500 backers. At the moment of launch, we saw multiple people initially backing for $10, and then upgrading to $51 or $26, after realizing the value of those tiers. 

Here is an embed of the project as it stands now:

We did over 30 days which is against everyone's recommendation. This is simply because we'll be showcasing (or at least show-ing) JetGetters at both GDC and PAX East. The idea is that it'll spark interest at both of those shows. Fingers crossed on that.