Monday Hot Takes: Stretch Goal Dilution

 

Originally it felt - to me anyway - that the goal of a "stretch goal" on Kickstarter was to incent people to jump in to help add value to the final product for the same cost. You would end up with a bigger book or more pieces in your game or more levels in your video game or more art in a book or full color printing instead of black & white only. I feel like that has been diluted over the last few years . It's probably related to the "crowdfunding as preorder" trend we see now instead of the old days where things were genuinely being created as part of the campaign. 

The Kickstarter for Underworld: Sunless Depths for 5E D&D and TOV has a good example of this:

New adventure ... alright ... another new adventure, sure ... pregen characters ...

Pregen characters? As a Stretch Goal? Implying there is some value in pregen characters? Seriously? This isn't even a new RPG where an example of some completed characters might be interesting to see - it's for 5E and Tales of the Valiant! In what world are 5 pregens characters worth anything?  In general I'm a fan of Kobold Press but this is just a waste of everyone's time.

The Guild had a Kickstarter to make a movie recently too and their stretch goals were mostly "make more movie" - what one would hope for right? At the end though they were adding music videos and finally an animated special. Not strictly making the movie bigger or better but at least they were fairly late in the game if still outside the boundaries of "let's make the thing better". I dislike this less.

Deathbringer had a big crowdfunding effort with a lot of stretch goals:

Most of them were adding monsters or items to the book so that's fine. Some were tokens to be used on the battleboard which was admittedly a significant part of the campaign so OK I guess. A VTT - OK not really part of the book and I'm sure they will sell access to this later. Online character creator -  That's fine, especially if it's free to everyone down the road. The one for offering unpainted versions of the statues which are pricey extras ... yeah that's a cop-out. There were a lot of these goals so I won't get too cranky about these few outliers but it's worth noting them. I feel like some of them are pretty loose-fitting as far as stretch goals should go.

Heck, the latest Savage Worlds Kickstarter for Deadlands didn't even bother with Stretch Goals. "Here's what we're making and here's a chance to order all of the other stuff we make for Deadlands too if you want it!" and that's pretty much it. Can't complain about your stretch goals if you don't have any!