What sort of patreon rewards excite you?

[Domiek]

Hi everyone, i recently released a demo of my game Personal Trainer but have refrained from adding anything higher than the $1 tier rewards. I want to create rewards that are fun and inticing for Patrons without resorting to silly artificially delayed releases.

One of my thoughts going forward is creating a "fan art development kit" that includes some .png characters and scenes as well as the actual Daz character saves. Is this something you guys may find interesting?

One thing I want to avoid are rewards that affect gameplay and rewards that delay game development (custom renders, animations, etc).

I'd love to hear your thoughts on what sort of rewards you'd like to see and what levels of involvement you'd like to have in the development process.

 

[j4yj4m]

Even though I don't know your game (yet) I think it kind of depends. If you've got discord a special channel for the highest tiers and very few spoilers are a good idea. Later on I could imagine some funny ingame rewards for those who contributed a lot (like getting their name mentioned in a somewhat "funny and optional, yet accessible way). Those should/could be connected to money that's actually spent and is probably a thinkg for later.

Else it's probably always a good idea to introduce polls for patreons and maybe even special polls for smaller decisions for higher tier patreons as well. It's not like those would chance anything you've planned buy maybe you can find some wiggle room to react to your patreon's priorities. In my optinoin that's always a good way to start and I personally like to pay for that. More involment is always a good thing but on the other hand I prefer devs who do have a firm grip and a good concept (and manage to let patreons be creative within that concept) since else most games would likely be the same in the end.

In your case I think it could be viable to let petreons decide on for example certain exersises, some developement priorities, outfits etc.

Once your patreon base gets large enough and some like to participate and you'll get your development kit going a competition for the best "result" to get implemented could be nice as well at some point.

Edit: Last but not least I have to say though, that I usually pledge to games I really like, whose dev seems to care and where I know that the money is in good hands. So next to a good game, a good communication and good releases remain likely the most important thing after all. That's why I personally always hesitate to pledge to someone who hasn't release at least 3 or 4 updates in a more or less timely manner.

 

[Domiek]

Thanks for the reply j4yj4m. Actually you just gave me a brilliant idea. I think I'll introduce "easter eggs" into the game for a certain tier based on the patrons name/interest.

This should make it a little more personal than simply adding a name to the "special thanks" section without delaying development since the Easter egg assets will be used in game for everyone.

 

[j4yj4m]

Easter eggs seem like a really nice idea though I'd be careful not to give them away too cheaply (one dev I support set the limit to get that kind of ingame mention at $50 dollars of total, real pledges for example). After all this kind of stuff takes your time from developing actual content for everybody and remains somewhat optional, so I guess there's a balance to find. A special thanks section is of course another easy (and cheaper) possibility and can be done pretty fast.

 

[Domiek]

Definitely need a fine balance between making something personal without delaying development. I figure since I'm already going to be making in game assets for the game (posters, decorations,etc) i can use that as an opportunity to really show some appreciation.

Will have to be a limited suppy tier for sure. Thanks again for your help with ideas.

 

[MaxCarna]

That's the one million dollars question

I believe some kinds of rewards depends on how big your project are: complex games have wikis, some rewards evolve grant write permission on the Wiki page. Other have blogs, popular Discord channels, just having a special role is already something that would please some users. I believe that different download files (extended version, special, master...) are not very effective because, well, people share these files without permission every time.

In my project as I considered yet a small project, all that I believe that I could offer was previous releases and scenes made by request. The last one had a strange behaviour, most patrons entered the tier but never ordered their scene.
I thought to create a tier for exclusive access in pools to decide the next steps, but the patrons of my project don't interact often. I recently created a discord channel.

Despite of all things that I cannot fully understand, our number of patrons is very beyond that we ever imagined. I increased my monthly goals more than once, to respond to this result.

Anyway, I will keep an eye on this topic to see if I also learn new ideas.

 

[Thanos247]

Everyone wants to feel like they are part of the game. We like visual novels with some choice to make us feel as if we are the avatars them self. So allowing people to pick maybe a certain sense, clothes, position (possibly some POV, NTR, etc), or actual avatars them self. Thanks to stuff like Facegen, I can make my ugly ass in the game and choose to fuck 100 girls. I’m sure I’m not the only person who thinks that is awesome.