So when I first saw the “Pay What You Want” method pop up on Kickstarter I was intrigued. Although I saw a modified version of if that was advertising “Pay What You Want (PWYW)” while giving people a set minimum price. This was confusing to me as that is not a true pay what you want. I was really curious to see what would happen if someone ran a true “Pay What You Want” campaign and I started exploring if that was something that Crash Games could do. A friend I had been discussing the PWYW idea with said he and his friend thought that if you didn’t ask for a minimum that people would pay more and be more generous and I was very curious to see if that would be the case so I decided to not ask for a minimum on the Domestic Level.

I then decided  that the micro game, “Where Art Thou, Romeo?” would be a great fit because it didn’t get wide distribution during the “Council of Verona” Kickstarter and a lot of people had missed out on it. My Kickstarter Backers are the number one priority in my business so I first needed to consult with them and see what they thought of this idea. The consensus was that the majority of them were cool with the idea so I set out to think about what I wanted to accomplish and I came up with this list:

What I wanted the WATR (“Where Art Thou, Romeo?”) Kickstarter to Accomplish

1. Put some extra coin in Michael Eskue & Adam McIver’s pockets in time for the Holidays.

2. Advertise & Promote the parent game, “Council of Verona”

3. Advertise & Promote the upcoming Pay Dirt Kickstarter Campaign

4. Advertise & Promote Crash Games

I sat down and crunched the numbers and calculated that worst case scenario, if every single backer pledged the minimum I would simply be paying somewhere around a couple hundred dollars for a small batch of Direct Mail Marketing. It was in this number crunching that I decided that only the Domestic Reward Level ($1 minimum) could be a true PWYW and the International Level needed to be a set minimum of $3 to cover high postage costs.

Kickstarter rejected the project initially stating that there was nothing to raise funds for as WATR was already a completed product. After reviewing their guidelines and double checking that the WATR Project did indeed fit within their guidelines I challenged Kickstarter and they approved the project. We were now set to go. Two weeks later we ended the campaign at 2,188 Backers and $5,723 dollars.  The numbers that follow are the true and full costs built into the campaign.

United States Reward Tier – $1 Minimum Pledge

Actual Cost – (1) Copy of WATR – $0.15

Envelope – $0.18

First Class U.S. Postage to Anywhere in the U.S – $1.12

Kickstarter & Amazon Fees  (If minimum was pledge) – $0.15*

True Cost of (1) Copy of WATR – $1.60

*Amazon must have a Minimum Fee of $0.10 regardless of how small the transaction is because none of my other campaign were over 10% between both Kickstarter & Amazon. Kickstarter charged 5% on the Minimum, $1 pledge resulting in a 15% charge instead of the normal 10%.

So how did people pledge?

Let’s find out.

The average pledge for the U.S. Reward Tier was $2.07 and the highest individual pledge was $50!

Number of Backers	Pledge Level	Percent
822	$1	57.44%
213	$2	14.88%
207	$3	14.47%
37	$4	2.59%
122	$5	8.53%
30	More	2.10%

Here is the Top Five States by Backers (We got at least one backer in each of the 50 States)

Rank	State	Number of Backers	Percent of Pledges
1	CA	211	14.74%
2	TX	97	6.78%
3	IL	84	5.87%
4	OH	77	5.38%
5	NY	75	5.24%

 

So the question is would people pay more if they were able to pay only a dollar has been answered and the majority of people (nearly 60%) said “no.” I find this to be very interesting because there are a lot of factors at play here. First off it was smack dab in the middle of Holiday Shopping Season. Were people already tapped out and didn’t have anymore money to spare? One could easily argue the flip side and ask aren’t we more generous during the Holidays? Then you have company popularity which can be gauged several ways. Nearly 2200 backers is a good amount but many micro games go reach upwards of 5000 backers. Again how much did the Holidays play into this? The bummer is I lost money on 60% of the pledges, which is roughly $500.

So here’s a look at the International Side

With the International Copies I couldn’t risk offering them at only $1 and after seeing how the domestic performed I am very glad that I did not.  Losing $0.60 a pledge is somewhat manageable but to lose $2.60 per pledge, especially when the number of International Backers would have sky rocketed if the pledge level was only $1 would have been potentially catastrophic. Therefore the International side was not a true PWYW. Here is how the International Reward Tier shook out.

International Reward Tier – $3 Minimum Pledge

Actual Cost – (1) Copy of WATR – $0.15

Envelope – $0.18

First Class International Postage – $2.25 (Canada) $2.90 (everywhere else)

Kickstarter & Amazon Fees  (If minimum was pledge) – $0.15*

True Cost of (1) Copy of WATR – $2.73 (Canada) $3.38 (everywhere else)

So the Canadian copies, where the minimum of $3 was pledged, resulted in a small profit of $0.28 each while the copies that went everywhere else resulted in a small loss of $0.38

So how did people pledge?

Number of Backers	Pledge Level	Percent
559	$3	74.43%
48	$4	6.39%
104	$5	13.85%
17	$6	2.26%
5	$7	0.67%
18	More	2.40%

 

Here is the Top Five International Countries by Backer (We had pledges from 45 unique International countries)

Rank	Country	Total Backers	Percentage
1	United Kingdom	159	21.17%
2	Canada	131	17.44%
3	Australia	67	8.92%
4	Netherlands	35	4.66%
5	Denmark	33	4.39%

There were of course other expenses built into the campaign. Here is a breakdown of those costs.

1. Envelopes for Shipping – $631 (*This ran higher than it needed to be because we were stuffing envelopes prior to knowing what the final number would be)

2. Thermal Labels – $75

3. Promotional Flyers inside envelope – $201

*The reason I was able to get WATR out to backers so fast is that my nephew, Spencer and I were stuffing envelopes with WATR and flyers while the campaign was running. This was a TREMENDOUS time saver as it meant we only had to slap labels on them and send them all out since they were all identical (this is the biggest reason why I wasn’t allowing backers to get multiple copies). By stuffing envelopes ahead of time though it meant I wouldn’t know the exact number and had to order extra envelopes. Thankfully they weren’t too expensive and I can use the excess to send out promotional items and replacement parts for multiple games.

Here is how the Shipping Costs shook out:

1. Domestic Shipping – $1,552.32

2. International Shipping – $2,322.90

When all the dust settled the project had a grand total of $368.48 of profit left. This wasn’t a true profit since I had already considered the WATR Cards ($0.15) paid for since I paid for these out of pocket back during the “Council of Verona” Campaign.  I also didn’t hold back any amount to send out replacement copies and I have had to send out a bunch; USPS really dropped the ball and lost a lot of the original copies I sent out. When you factor that I didn’t count the WATR Cards cost the PWYW Campaign was a net loss but I do not consider it a failure and here is why.

1. I took $400 and divided it up between the designer, artist and graphic designer and was able to give them a nice little Christmas Bonus. I had to round it up to $400 out of pocket but I was happy to do so.

2. People were shocked and amazed at how fast they got the game and this is a big PR bump for Crash Games.

3. I was able to direct mail market to each and every backer that received the game.

In the future would I run another True PWYW Kicktarter Campaign? Probably not. It was a tremendous amount of work and without being able to see physical, tangible results it would be difficult to justify the work when I could spend that time on developing or publishing a bigger, more profitable game. It sure was fun experiment though.