The truth behind Kickstarter stretch goals
What are stretch goals?
Those of you who have never backed a tabletop Kickstarter project may be unfamiliar with what a stretch goal is. On Kickstarter, people create projects and set a funding goal in order to launch that project into reality. Stretch goals are additional goals beyond the funding goal. In return for hitting each stretch goal, the creator will usually promise additional features, components, content, etc.
In the tabletop category, stretch goals are very common — even expected! Strangely, this trend is absent in all other Kickstarter project categories, as noted by Jamey Stegmaier this blog post. In a board game project, you’ll often see stretch goals that promise upgrading the card quality, linen finish, custom meeples, extra cards and even gameplay elements. You’ll often see creators pushing their backers to share, share, share in order to boost the funding amount to hit those stretch goals and unlock the rewards.
But here’s the dirty secret… It doesn’t matter. Stretch goals have been so commonplace in board game projects that 90% of them are actually MADE UP. The reality is that the creator had always planned to use that nicer card stock and that linen finish. They always planned to create custom meeples. There were always going to include that additional art (they already commissioned it, didn’t they?). The reality is that linen finish only adds a few pennies of cost to each game yet almost every game lists it as a stretch goal.
So that begs the question. Are project creators that offer these stretch goals acting dishonestly? The answer is not so straight forward. The fact is that many of them were forced into the situation.
There is a board game renaissance happening right now. With crowdfunding, getting a project off the ground and into the hands of the masses is easier than ever, but it’s also getting crowded and competitive. Everyone is looking somewhere or for someone for guidance. The indie designer/publisher community is actually very open about discussing campaign strategies and best practices, and through one way or another, stretch goals have simply become mandatory for launching a tabletop Kickstarter campaign.
With the hundreds of games being released each month, Kickstarter backers are demanding more than ever. They want to know where the extra money beyond the funding goal is going. They want more content, more value, and more exclusives. In response, creators are using stretch goals to dangle that carrot to keep the funding stream going. The claim is that the extra funding will unlock that extra card or trinket, but in reality the publisher has already play tested the game with all the stretch goal content and the cost of adding an additional card to a game is negligible.
In fact, it’s a well known common practice to not reveal your stretch goals right away and instead to reveal each goal one at a time in order to make each goal appear just within arms reach. See how your first few days of funding go and set your stretch goals accordingly. The goal is to spread out the goals to generate excitement but also hit all of the goals by the end of the campaign. I’ve even seen campaigns that don’t hit their final stretch goals but they get included into the final product anyways.
So are all stretch goals a complete artificially constructed? No. Stretch goals have had humble beginnings and have only mutated into this crazy marketing hype machine in recent years. The reality is there are economies of scale when manufacturing anything. When you manufacture a higher quantity of items, the cost per item goes down but the amount backers are pledging remains constant. At some point someone had the great idea of reinvesting that extra money into improving the components of the game and thus stretch goals were born.
Upgrades like wooden or metal pieces instead of cardboard do have a significant cost to them. Plastic inserts or extra minis have significant setup costs. Other improvements like linen finish do not. The strangest of stretch goals are the ones that reveal extra game content like an additional card. It seems to imply the creator is willing to sell me a game without that content, but it makes me wonder — is that card part of the game or not? Is the game better or worse with that card? Did they even play test this? And the answer is usually that they planned on including that content from the very beginning whether the project hit that goal or not.
So what’s the takeaway from all of this? I think it’s time to bring our focus back to what matters — the game itself. Stretch goals are great when they are real, but I believe in transparency and honesty. I understand the need to build that funding momentum and fuel that excitement but I believe that backers will begin to see the reality of the situation and stretch goals will lose their effectiveness and as a result creators will lose some of the backers’ trust. In the end we all want the same thing. Great games with great components at a great price.
