Could the Kickstarter have gone better with a lower base price?

There has been a bit of controversy over reward tier pricing of Satellite Reign. The impetus of the discussion came from an article on RPS, where the author criticized the pricing model in strong words:

5 Live Studios horrendously screwed up their reward tiers, and frankly they’re lucky to be funded at all. Starting game-purchasing pledges at £13, and then limiting it to only 1,000 people, was ridiculous. Making the regular price of the game £16/$25 just ensured that they were going to struggle. Firstly, it’s infuriating to someone just learning of the Kickstarter for the first time to discover that they have to pay more because… because of what? So that puts people off. Secondly, $25 as an entry price is really pushing its luck for a game that’s still ideas on paper. The daft thing is, if they’d put the entry tier at $15 and made it 5 or 10,000, and then the regular price at $20, they’d have been funded long ago, and right now be counting off the stretch goals. Hopefully others will learn from this – lower prices means bigger sales, more money, more profit, and that’s never more true than with Kickstarter of strong potential.

The main criticism (besides the low number of “early bird” slots) is therefore that the base price was supposedly too high. This issue was also brought up on the Kickstarter comment section, where a backer wrote:

It’s a real shame about that price point. $25 USD for a level that includes a copy of the game. While I was willing to part with that for this risk, most people will not be. That is a very rare price-point. Even the popular well-known franchises from known studios with known people on the project promising huge experiences are usually $10 to $15 USD. If this had a $15 USD price-point, you would have blown so far past your goals.

Unfortunately, I see a lot of projects with the attitude that they have to “hold on to everything” as if by giving it at a lower price than you’ll eventually sell it for, you’re somehow losing money. In reality (as proved-out by Steam’s sales, in fact) you would get much more by going fairly lower priced. […]

Mike Diskett replied with the following statement:

[…] here’s why I think they might be wrong. (I posted this on another thread)

We have 60,000 views of our kick starter video, and 13000 backers.
That’s a conversion rate of 21% which is astronomical.
Had we overpriced I think we would have seen a far lower conversion rate.
Also we get a ton of email feedback out of literally thousands of emails not one that I can think of has said they won’t back us because we are overcharging.
I know we made a lot of mistakes but I don’t believe the price of the pledge tier for the game was one of them.

.MikeD

The conversion rate is certainly impressive, which suggests that the pitch was fine, but simply didn’t reach enough people. So what do you people think – could a lower base price have brought in more funds overall?



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