The importance of stretch goals for crowdfunding campaigns has waxed and waned over the years. A recent poll on this blog even indicated that backers are far more interested in getting the best version of a product than the carrot-on-a-stick approach to stretch goals.
However, there’s nothing inherently wrong with stretch goals, and I think plenty of creators will continue to use them. Many of those creators will wisely plan ahead with a variety of goals that consider budget and schedule, and they might add a few stretch goals along the way thanks to backer suggestions.
But the day may come when you simply run out of stretch goals. What do you do then?
The temptation that I experienced in my Kickstarter days was to find some other stretch goal to add so there is no “final” stretch goal. Maybe that approach will work for you, but is it really worth the risk to your budget and schedule? If you’ve already reached 10 goals, is an 11th really going to have a positive impact on your campaign? Plus, if you don’t reach the final goal, backers may feel like product is somehow “incomplete.”
So my core advice is that as you approach the final stretch goal, advertise it as such. Make it abundantly clear that it’s the final goal and that more won’t be added. If some backers continue to pressure you to add more, thank them for their ideas and say that you’ll note them for a future expansion.
There’s another approach brought to my attention by my Rise of Fenris co-design, Ryan. It requires some advance planning, and it was recently used by the creators of Philosophia: Floating World, a tabletop project the includes art of some digital restored ukiyo-e paintings.
For their final stretch goal, they created a PDF art book, which every backer will receive. For each additional £1,000 they earned in the last few days of the campaign, they added 5 pages to the art book using the abundance of art in the game.
Basically, the clever twist here is that the final stretch goal has the flexibility to expand as much as necessary without impacting the budget or schedule. Yes, there is the graphic design expense of laying out the digital art book, but it’s not going to ruin the budget, and it can be constructed while the manufacturer is busy printing the game.
For tabletop game projects, any digital extension could work for an expandable final goal. If an art book doesn’t work well for you, you could create a strategy guide or design diary. It doesn’t even need to be a PDF–it could be a video or podcast series.
Again, this isn’t going to please every backer. But if your project has done well enough that you’ve reached a number of stretch goals and made the product as good as it can be, I think that’s a good time to cap off those goals or divert to a digital goal like Philosophia did.
What do you think about this approach? Have you seen other projects use this expandable approach to their final goal?
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Read more: The Current State of Stretch Goals
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18 Comments on “What to Do If You Run Out of Stretch Goals”
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Jamey,
Thanks for your feedback and quick replies. So as not to appear too self serving on your blog, I would like to ask a question that should benefit everyone.
How do you know if your stretch goal, or even just something you think of as a core attractor in your campaign is too tangential?
I mean we’ve all scoffed at the campaigns that want to throw T-shirts and buttons at you, or worse make you pay for them. But I backed Runika, which is a really nice dice puzzle game in the vein of Sagrada that is supposed to come with a Novella. I don’t care about the Novella and am happy with the game, but my sister is a Harry Potter fan, so the Novella would make a nice gift (the theme is a magic school). I’ve asked this question on BGG and the response was quite mixed.
So, Jamey, what do you think? Would a Novella be a nice stretch goal, or too tangential? What else have you seen that would fall on either side of that fence?
Kevin: Thanks for your question, and I think that’s clever of you to think of these types of bonuses as potential gifts (that might be worth reminding backers of). My take on this is that most backers are there to get the core product (or a special version of the core product), and if you show signs of losing focus, not only can you lose the trust of backers, but you can also spend a lot of time on something that hardly anyone pays attention to. So while I don’t have a firm answer to your question, a question I’d recommend creators ask themselves is, “Does this add value to the experience of a majority of backers?”
Hi all,
I worked as one of the designers on Philosophia: Floating World. Firstly I’d like to say a huge thanks to Jamey for mentioning our project and to Ryan for bringing it to his attention. We are huge fans of Stonemaier games and Jamey’s blog has been an invaluable asset in helping us create our games, so it’s very exciting to see ourselves mentioned.
The digital art book stretch goal was a very late addition to the project and was actually suggested by a backer. We really weren’t expecting to run out of stretch goals and so having something else we could bring to our backers without having to worry about extra weight and manufacturing costs was great. We also really liked that it gave us another way to show off the wonderful digitally restored ukiyo-e artwork that fills the game.
Feel free to ask if you have any questions about our campaign!
Joe
Thanks for chiming in, Joe! I really like your ingenuity in following the backer suggestion and creating such a flexible final goal.
I ran into this “problem” during my last Kickstarter campaign. A few backers had some good ideas for the game and I posted an update asking for feedback on these potential low-impact stretch goals. I also made it clear that I was not willing to add things that were likely to cause delays. Luckily, backers were very understanding, so in the end I sprinkled these smaller stretch goals in between the planned ones. We unlocked the final goal 7 days before the end of the campaign, and it was actually kind of nice to have that finality.
The most current Nemesis Kickstarter I thought handled their stretch goals really well. They revealed a “new” goal every two days for the duration. That said, it was just time gated and not monetarily locked out. That meant that we as backers knew that it was planned content, that it would have a much better chance of being playtested, and that it kept that drip feed of “ooo what’s new” to keep people checking in on the project. I far prefer that than to have something gated off. Because I’ve been in too many situations where backers start asking “well what if the u met goals are just an expansion that we can pay extra for in the pledge manager”. And that approach seems even worse than if they just left it off entirely.
Near the end that should read “unmet” not “u met”. Additionally, in further thinking on this, I like the idea of stretch goals mostly only if there is going to be a retail version. SGs help define a user experience of helping to bring a project to fruition in a way retail doesn’t. I do think that SGs should be reasonably priced and available for retail to avoid the incredibly painful secondary market chase for people that want to see the “full experience” of the game. If the game itself isn’t heading to retail (and lets use Nemesis again), then I’m largely confused as to why non-component quality upgrades would exist as a SG. While I liked the way that Nemesis Lockdown handled these extras it also just seemed like it was content that could have just been base game so that way we could all have full game experience. Because of that separation I was excessively tempted to spend too much money to back all of it (even though I was there primarily for OG Nemesis as I missed that KS). I ultimately decided that it wasn’t justifiable and kept to my original pledge. I don’t normally have FOMO but the idea that all of the SG stuff was backwards compatible made me feel like I was somehow getting an incomplete version of the original despite the fact that it was content produced after release. I know this all comes off as likely contradictory but because of the lack of reasonable retail release of those goals it made that choice very difficult for me.
I may be mistaken but I believe Jamey tried this kind of timed release stretch goal thing with Scythe back in 2015. I don’t for call now exactly how it worked, it was my first Kickstarter and I was a little lost, but he tried something that did not tie the stretch goals to funding and there was practically a revolt among the backers. Eventually he had to arbitrarily tie the stretch goals to some funding numbers to make everyone feel better. I wish I could recall the details, but if you are interested he made a post about it in one of the early Kickstarter updates. I think most of it went down sometime in the first 5-10 updates of the campaign.
That’s correct, Ryan–it happened right at the beginning of the project. I think part of the problem is that I intended to start the stretch goals after the first day of funding, while backers wanted to already have that feeling of unlocking goals on the first day. So I retroactively said we had surpassed some stretch goals.
Personally I think that stretch goals are great for small projects that don’t know if they’re going to fund. Putting up a game that is the Minimum Viable Product should have a good deal of room for improvement on elements like component quality and finish. It can be hard to put out a game that doesn’t have the premium finish a creator might want, but sometimes its a choice between that and not putting it out at all. At that point I think that having a final stretch goal makes perfect sense. I love the idea of a constantly expanding digital reward though, I think that a lot of the point of stretch goals for many backers is less about the actual reward than it is about the sense of progress and community that builds up around them, and a digital reward like the artbook PDF is a great way to do that. Also, artwork is a big expense for a lot of first time creators and getting a little more juice out of it is always nice.
As a backer, I can say that stretch goals don’t motivate me. But that’s because I’m one of those weirdos who don’t count their chickens before they hatch, don’t spend more than they have, and have never had FOMO or even just buyer’s remorse since I put in the research.
As a designer, the existence of stretch goals as a concept has me tossing and turning at night. The thought of holding some critical part of the design back just because my backers didn’t give me as much money as I had hoped strikes me as disingenuous. Alternatively, the idea of creating something new frightens me just as much. It has taken me years to get to this point, and a large chunk of that time was spent playtesting. But it would be a disservice to my backers not to playtest a stretch goal, which the virus has made far more challenging.
It may simply be the sandbox nature of the game I am planning on kickstarting that makes it difficult to dole it out in pieces,but I am led, apprehensively, to the conclusion that my best path forward is to have a single reward tier – the best possible version of the game that I can release into the world based on our funding goal and number of backers.
Is a single reward tier egalitarian, or foolish?
I can definitely relate to that, Kevin. As for a single reward tier, I think it’s fine, though I think Kickstarter is a great place for a standard option and a premium option with something like a special box, metal coins, etc.
Kevin, are there not component quality related stretch goals that you could offer rather than gameplay element extras? Things like linen finish, card GSM or punchboard thickness can add up to enough money to be the difference between funding and not for a small project, if you start off with a minimum viable product version of the components to get funded and then up the quality as more backers result in more profits that’s often one of the best ways of doing stretch goals.
I may be overly cautious in projected my prospects of success. Failing is easy since nothing would change, but beyond that, I need to be able to place an order with my manufacturer of 500 copies of the game at a minimum. Sailing past that would be great, but I don’t have any name recognition to fall back on. If the only thing Unbored Entertainment LLC ever amounts to is getting 500 copies of my game into the world, I’ll humbly consider that a win.
The idea and desire for the game came to me at a time in my life when I didn’t have a lot of pocket change. I would have loved a game like Gloomhaven, but miniatures are expensive and I had a hard time scrounging up the $50-70USD for games I did buy, let alone the then $200 Gloomhaven would have run. That me back then is the personification of my target market, and is the reason I am sensitive to costs. If I had a deluxe tier, wouldn’t my manufacturer treat that as a separate order and therefore I would need 500 of each?
My game is a hybrid deck builder in the vain of Mage Knight. The hook is my hexes are made out of transparent card stock, letting you lay a hex that has say desert terrain on it, and then a clear overlay that indicates you have discovered a village in that desert. There isn’t a lot I can do there component wise (there is only one such cardstock). The remainder of the game consists of cards, character figures, and tokens, and yes there’s some leeway there, but they are means to and end. The end being the experience of playing the game. I have a hard time identifying a component that I could spruce up by way of stretch goals that would be meaningful and still keep me in my target price point.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1233705344/711527577?ref=byqcju&token=2c57e572
I guess, if I do go with stretch goals, I just need to figure out how to price them out before I worry about running out of them.
Hi Kevin,
I’m not suggesting that you do deluxe levels, but rather that you take advantage of either increased profits or better print run margins to add something to the game. So for example, imagine that it costs you $5k to get your print run of 500, it will likely cost more like $8k to get a print run of 1000. Now, if you sell the game at, for example, $30 for $20 mark up, if you get to 1000 you can now add $2 onto your manufacturing unit price and still have just the same mark-up. No-one is suggesting that you make 500 basic and 500 deluxe, but rather if you get to $8k that you can make all the copies a little more snazzy. Alternatively, if your break even point is, say, $6k, then when you get to $7k rather than taking the post break even money as profit you spend some of it upgrading all the copies of a game.
You can still offer a premium finish to the box, or higher cardstock to the cards, or linen finish. You might not value those things, but some backers really do, and they all appreciate contributing to making the overall product that little bit more fancy.
Thanks. Right now we’re looking at a minimum production cost of $25 per unit at 500. And that’s without free shipping. This will be my first kickstarter. Can you make free shipping a stretch goal, or does the way you set up reward tiers prevent this?
That’s a really high production cost, Kevin! You *could* make free shipping a stretch goal by not charging shipping during the project, but I would recommend against it, as shipping costs vary quite a bit by region–backers in the US might save $10, but a backer in South Africa would save $50 if that goal is met.
Thanks, Jamey. I’m not sure what I can do about my costs. I’m already planning on doing character standees instead of minis. The transparent map tiles add about $6 per unit to our production costs, but I feel like we would lose our wow factor if we didn’t have them.