General News - The Management of Stretch Goals

Thmoas Bidaux has written a two part blog on Gamasutra about stretch goals, the do's and don'ts.

The TLDR for Part 1 is:

Don’t announce any stretch goals. Be humble about your initial goal, be focused on the early days of your campaign.

Plan for different scenarios.

Don’t feel like you need to have Stretch Goals because everyone else have them.

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And for Part 2:

• Treat stretch goals like mini-campaigns in themselves
• Focus on what the community wants
• Think through how would-be backers interested in them will hear about their existence

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More information.

I wish crowd-funded projects would stop with stretch-goals, too.

I've done a lot of amateur consulting for crowd-funded projects, because I'm known to back a lot of them since nearly the very beginning of the whole thing. This is on thing I have always stressed.

RockStar doesn't say "gosh, we sold way more copies than we needed, so we're going to spend all that extra game making the game even cooler!". They have a game they want to make and they scale the project according to their interest, budget, and time. That's it.

Likewise, a crowd-funded project that aims for $100k needs to make a $100k game. If they get $500k, there's no obligation to make a $500k game. You promised a $100k game. The rest is profit (or safety net).

Don't get me wrong, if you make $4,000,000 on a project you needed $400,000 for, I'd really like you to make the game even bigger and better and higher quality... but I don't need to have the specifics justified to me for more pledges. Just do it. If it works out. if it fits. If you have the time and resources and it makes sense in the context of the game.

I agree with you. I can only guess that the studios have concluded that the visible stretch goals are effective in keeping the donations coming.

I like stretch goals, especially when they are well thought out and add great features that the game wouldn't have had otherwise. Also, its an incentive for people to continue backing after the minimum funding level has been met, and it keeps the excitement going during the campaign.

I think the primary marketing benefit of stretch goals is to keep the Kickstarter project in the news, and for that they can serve very well. They provide a focus for developer updates and maintain some level of buzz among gamers. Hence, I doubt they will be going away.

You don't set a budget because that's where the game you really want to make is at. You set it because it's what you believe you can achieve, and that you can deliver something that everyone will be happy or at least ok with.

Almost exclusively, there are a lot of compromises involved - because developers know that the community is not an endless fountain of money. They can't just start out with their dream game and ask for millions.

Stretch goals are a way to involve the community and expand the game and make it better.

It's a win-win if it's done right, and it makes no sense to me to take that away.

That said, I do think they need to be handled with care - and developers should strive for realistic goals that fit with the overall vision of the game.

Very, very, very simple KISS (keep it simple stupid) matter to me:

Don't overpromise and underdeliver. Do it the other way around.

Moriendor said:

Very, very, very simple KISS (keep it simple stupid) matter to me:

Don't overpromise and underdeliver. Do it the other way around.

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So, if they underpromise - will they get a bigger or smaller budget?

If the budget is smaller, and let's not kid ourselves - it will be MUCH smaller - do you think the result is going to be better or worse, even if they deliver on their promises?

See, that's where your logic falls apart.

Because a broken promise means absolutely nothing if the game is the better for it.

That's what small-minded people simply can't understand. They just focus on what they were promised, and they focus on being pissed about being "cheated".

Like spoiled children, they don't appreciate their 9 gifts for Christmas - because they were promised 10 gifts.

Sure, some projects will fail and end up a mess. But taking the risk will inevitably give us the greatest games - because they won't all fail.

Your way will give us safe, boring and overly familiar games.