Kickstarter Advice – Exclusives on Kickstarter
The overall scores said the importance of exclusives was -1, averaging it out right in the middle, so let’s dive a little deeper.
THE VOTES
In total we had 760 responses to the question “How important are exclusives for a board game on Kickstarter?”
| RESPONSE | VOTES |
| Make it go away | 20.9% |
| Not important | 11.4% |
| Doesn’t matter | 28.4% |
| Important | 25.3% |
| Very important | 14% |
Wow! When I first saw these numbers it really opened my eyes, I know this has been a heavily discussed topic for a long time but the numbers are so divided. If you labelled, make it go away/not important as no and important/very important as yes you get this:
| No | 32.3% |
| Doesn’t matter | 28.4% |
| Yes | 39.3% |
However, the make it go away vote is 6.9% bigger than the very important vote, so this is fairly close to a 1/3 split for all 3 options – hence the -1 average score.
CONCLUSION
Exclusives are always going to be a difficult topic and you will have people who are happy and people who are annoyed whichever way you go. I plan to do a follow up survey which will explore this topic much further and test various options.
My own thoughts are exclusives are an important part of picking up backers but they will frustrate a large group of potential customers after the campaign is finished.
I will be exploring 2 ideas for my campaign which are:
1) Temporary exclusives which will be available to everyone during the campaign but then incur a delayed release to retail. This seems like a good option but complicates retail release and may not be practical.
2) Heavily discounted exclusives which will be available as self-contained items after the campaign but at a higher price than the campaign price.
Perhaps neither of these 2 things are really “exclusives” by the fact they will be available to all, but they might just please both sides of the line. To answer this, further research is required.