If you’ve been following Pantheon’s Kickstarter, then you already know that the project has failed to meet its goal within the allotted time. Like many other companies, Visionary Realms has ventured into a self-hosted private funding system where people donate directly to the the company rather than through a third party. Those with money to burn can head on over to the Pantheon website and throw in anywhere up to ten thousand dollars for the highest tiers of rewards. The $100 tier is actually a great deal, when you consider that it includes two copies of the game, plus alpha and beta access and a bunch of exclusive items and titles that gamers tend to go nuts over.
The $100 tier and higher also give lifetime access to the supporter and apprentice developer benefits. What are those, you ask? You must not have looked at the picture at the top of this article. For $5 a month, you gain the privilege of posting in the public areas of the forums and wikis, and access to the supporter forums. For $15, you get all that plus the ability to chat with the developers during live streaming. Oh and you get a special color for your forum avatar for both.
Now I fully understand people wanting to help get a game out the door, which is why Kickstarter exists, but fifteen dollars a month? For the privilege of posting on a forum and being either ignored or drowned out by the sea of voices? For the special opportunity to communicate with the developers while they Live Stream, a feat that a growing number of early-access developers have managed to provide for absolutely free? A special color next to your name? The chance to fully understand how to sink money into a pit and receive nothing in return? Because aside from what is essentially a more expensive and recurring version of Something Awful’s forum fee, you are ultimately paying for the good feeling of saying at least you tried to help. Subscribing over the course of a full year would cost $180, and you get nothing. Not a free copy of the game, no items, no titles, no nothing.
At this point you’re probably thinking “why not just pick a higher tier?” Understandable, but fifteen dollars a month for a lot of people is more feasible than a straight up payment of $180, and easier to convince those who have the money but might simply not want to part with such a sum at once. This is why many stores adopt a layaway plan, and Visionary Realms obviously understands this concept because they are using it themselves. Plans that cost over one thousand dollars all have the option to pay off over the course of a year, plus what appears to be about 20% interest.
So because I’m a problem solver, and I believe that this is a factor of bad planning rather than malicious intent (dear internet trolls), I have devised a method that I believe would bring more interest to the Pantheon forum subscription. The idea is simple, take the subscription and tie it into the layaway plan. Take the standard reward tiers and boost them up, and allow accounts to automatically fall into those brackets once they hit a certain cumulative total.
Just as an example and a rough idea, I’ve listed a personal draft of the new tiers, compared to the one-off price, which I would submit had I worked at Visionary Realms.
- $25 Seeker’s Pledge – $40 (3 months). Includes beta access, digital copy, and name reservation.
- $35 Fallen’s Pledge – $55 (4 months). Seeker reward plus title of “Fallen.”
- $45 Explorer’s Pledge – $70 (5 months). Seeker reward plus title and item.
- $60 Risen’s Pledge – $90 (6 months). Seeker reward plus title, item, and character slot.
- $75 Founder’s Pledge – $110 (8 months). Seeker reward plus title, item, character slot, backpack.
- $85 Warder’s Pledge – $140 (10 months). Seeker reward plus title, item, character slot, backpack, tunic.
And so on and so forth.
If you figure that the Kickstarter estimated date for delivery was January 2017, someone who pays $5 a month starting now would have put in $175 by 2017, or enough to go over the inflated Warder’s pledge by a fair amount. A person who pays $15 a month during that same time period would generate $525. Now I am not a marketing expert, but I think it is safe to say that offering reward tiers, even at the greatly inflated prices I have set above, would bring in more revenue than what I can only assume is a hope that people will simply choose the $100 or higher options to avoid the forum subscription altogether.
Like I said, I’m not a marketing expert, but I do know that $140 for the top pledge over the course of ten months is a lot more money than no dollars over the same time period.
Any thoughts? Drop a comment below.
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