Since looking askance at Penny Arcade's Kickstarter campaign shortly after its launch, I've talked about how I think they blew their pitch in their introductory video and the problems I saw in the underlying philosophy of the project from the start.
Here's the thing: I would like there to be room in Kickstarter (or the host of crowdfunding alternatives it would seem guaranteed to spawn in 3, 2, 1...) for an essentially philosophical pitch. The paradigm shift PA's Kickstarter suggested - the displacement of advertising by direct funding by the reader base - is something I'm absolutely on board with. That's why I threw them $5. And by the back of my envelope if they had convinced less than 10% of their putative 3.5 million readers to do the same they would be fully funded right now.
But if you want to execute an extraordinary idea you have to construct an extraordinary campaign. I think there were deep flaws in how Penny Arcade's campaign was constructed that prefigured it falling so thoroughly short of its highest aspirations.
My first issue was the primary goal. And I think this is the first of several arenas where the design of the campaign attempted to "customize" an observed phenomena of highly successful Kickstarter projects but got it wrong; the phenomenon in question here being the lowball price point. The obvious benefit of a low price point is it makes the goal seem less surmountable to the potential funder, I suppose. But I think Penny Arcade's version got the narrative messed up: not to belabor this example (except I'm totally gonna because it's the one I've dwelt on the most after PA), but Double Fine's project started with a probably too-low price point and they acknowledged it was near the minimum they could turn around any sort of a game at all, let alone a full-fleshed adventure game. This is the scrappy underdog all over - we might only barely manage, but we'll deliver something that honors the spirit of what we've been talking about. By contrast Penny Arcade offered an incomplete project for it's low-ball bid. And here's the core of it: when the pitch is fundamentally philosophical (go ad free for a purer experience) an incomplete project is hardly better than no project at all. So you got rid of one ad: what's pure about that?
Right at the start of the pitch video PA business manager Robert Khoo informs the viewer what they need: a million dollars. They proceed to ask for... a quarter of that. Not because they think they can scrape by and achieve a philosophically honest version of the goal for that. At best they're offering what amounts to a token nod to the philosophy of the goal for that. So why? The unspoken but unavoidable message is that it's because the full million is too much. Too much to ask for, too much to expect. They put the idea right into the viewers mind.
I believe a huge part of pretty much every successful Kickstarter narrative is this basic idea: we can't do this without you. We can't do this unless you step up. You have to want the product, yes, but you also have to feel like you ought to help. Penny Arcade's low goal for an incomplete project spoils this story. The story it ended up with is "we're going to do our thing anyway but if you want to you can help us make a half-assed nod to doing it a better way". Is it much surprise almost 80,000 more funders were inspired by the story Double Fine spun
This leads right into my second complaint, which is the construction of the stretch goals track. Again I suspect the idea was to emulate a number of successful projects that have leveraged the enticement of stretch goals - bonus rewards or project enhancements that are triggered by reaching funding goals above the primary. I've been trying not to engage in this assessment in too much prognostication about the thinking that went into how to construct this project, since obviously I'm just guessing. But I'll justify this one by noting that site writer Jerry Holkins has discussed his fascination with the mechanics of stretch goals and runaway success in Kickstarter campaigns.
The problem here I think is that it appears to me that stretch goals in successful campaigns are something that have mostly developed organically - they are responsive to success. Penny Arcade's "treasure map" of "locked" stretch goals was an obviously prefabricated, contrived narrative. What it's actually trying to do is fix the broken pitch. Justify the actual ask. I think there is quite a bit wrong with many of the the goals themselves - too much fanservice, too little sensible connection between the putative goal (going ad-free) and the stretch "rewards" (mainly extra-comic content). In subsequent postings and updates Penny Arcade (primarily in the voice of Mike Krahulik - and it's a topic worthy of a post in itself that I'm not going to write that Krahulik has basically carried the weight of promoting this project outside of its Kickstarter page) an attempt was made to connect the narrative - the idea that freeing the creators from the work of advertising - primarily from the creativity-intensive Penny Arcade Presents projects that create original works about advertising properties - would open a space for all this new creative potential. But like so much of this project this meat was buried deep inside the increasingly convoluted narrative, and even then a lot of the connection was contrived. How is going ad-free supposed to make it more possible to create a reality "television" style show about America's Next Top Webcomic? The real story seems to be "come on, make the goal, we'll do a cool thing!"
Lastmost for this entry - and it's become clear to me that there's going to have to be a fourth one because I'm done with this for today - but much has been made of the projects rewards and they did surely suck. I pretty much said my piece about that in my initial foray. PA more or less acknowledged that they wanted to avoid committing to a lot of expenses and work in reward fulfillment. I think the goal could have been attained with a lot more generosity and style. The gag rewards were a mistake in my opinion: I just don't believe anyone's pledge hinged on getting to see Mike Krahulik yell at a duck and if not, then what you've done is make a not-insigificant amount of work to literally no benefit. The same goes for the "certificate". Could there be a stupider, more worthless reward? I'm trying not to repeat myself too much but seriously, what are you going to do with this thing? Stick it in a file or pin it to a board or throw it away. For a nominal additional cost they could have created an original, limited edition print. It needn't be top quality, it just needed to be SOMETHING. Instead they still have to negotiate a printing project and mailing out 5,000 pieces of paper that nobody wanted, nobody asked for, nobody pledged because of and most won't keep.
I think I (and many others) may have overestimated the impact of rewards on the project's limited success. But I do believe that a critical missing element was first a solid, low-tier (under $10) digital offering - a collection of wallpapers and icons, something, as long as it was new - and a solid, middle-tier tangible offering. A print, sticker, button... something tangible, produced only for the project, available only for funders, for $25 or less.
Last gripe about the rewards - too much high-dollar (over $1000), inside baseball, "patron" rewards. The result? The per-donor average is $60 to (again) Double Fine's $40. But Double Fine enticed almost 12 times as many to participate.
Last chapter I'm going to talk about how I think the partial success is actually going to be an albatross for the business for the whole next year, and how I'd do it different if I were them, which I'm not, and if they tried again, which I suspect they won't.
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