We’d like to thank each and every one of the hundreds of respondents to our Kickstarter survey – the information we were able to gather from that has been invaluable and has led to us making a number of tweaks to our campaign. We’ll be going into a little more detail on the figures throughout this post and, in light of this information, we’ll be launching KS with slightly different perks, tiers, etc. than we’d initially planned.

Just before that, though, we’re going to answer the big question about Kickstarter: when is it launching? The answer: hopefully by the end of next week. We delayed the launch to try and gather community feedback on the funding process (after some lively discussion on various community forums), to ensure we’re living up to the community’s expectations – and also due to another small delay that was out of our hands (which is now, thankfully, resolved). When we’ve adjusted the rewards, budget and tiers, we’ll be submitting the final campaign to Kickstarter for approval (a ~48 hour process), then launching!

During the time we’ve been gathering your feedback, we’ve still been hard at work on the game and making the Kickstarter Demo even more impressive. Markku and Kimmo have particularly been making some important strides with the physics engine, and we’re all really excited to let you get your hands on what we’ve been working on (even if it is at such an early stage).

We were also greatly encouraged by the hundreds of amazing, motivating comments that you guys left on the survey and they’ve been a huge boost to us in these past few weeks. If you left a comment offering to help us promote/advertise the Kickstarter to a wider audience, please email info@curiouschicken.co.uk as all the survey responses were anonymous, and we have no way to get in contact with you

But, for now, to the survey results…

Prelude

Firstly, we were astonished by the responses we received from you guys – both in quantity, and in the detailed comments and suggestions you fed back to us… it took us a very, very long time to read through everything, but every single bit of it has been read and carefully considered!

“Are you considering contributing to the funding process?”

A staggering 89% of survey respondents said that they were considering contributing to the Kickstarter campaign for GeneRally 2 – a figure which is far beyond our wildest dreams. Of the remaining 11%, only 2 people disagreed with the Kickstarter process “on principle” (one saying they would pirate the game at release), whilst the remainder simply felt unable to contribute (either due to their own financial situation, or due to the payment methods needed) but were pleased that the game was being funded via Kickstarter.

Rewards

As expected, digital rewards were very popular with the majority of people. These rewards included both things that we would be giving away at different funding tiers (like alpha & beta access), as well as features that would be available only to those contributing to the funding of GeneRally 2.

The two most popular digital rewards, by a considerable margin, were Online Multiplayer (with 70% of people feeling the feature was important to them) and Alpha/Beta Access (75%). On the less popular end of the scale were the digital book (25%) and “your likeness as an in-game spectator” (28%). 63% of you said you’d be happy with digital versions of “physical” rewards, which correlated well with the rest of the data received.

In terms of physical rewards, it quickly became clear that they were far less popular than we’d initially anticipated. Whilst we obviously do want to keep some physical rewards in the hopes of enticing people outside of the current community to contribute, we’re also looking carefully at which physical rewards to offer and how many of each to produce, in order to keep our fulfilment costs (and, therefore, our budget) low. Clearly the least favourite were the poster/postcard rewards (with only 17% and 8% interest, respectively) – and, as such, we’ll be removing these two perks from the Kickstarter rewards entirely.

The T-Shirts and boxed/limited editions were, unsurprisingly, the most desired options, with the vast majority of respondents being interested in one or the other. We feel that these are the ‘staples’ of our physical rewards, and we’ll definitely be keeping them for contributing at certain tiers during the funding process. We’re also looking into a few of the other suggestions that were made by the community, including (but not limited to) mugs, 3D printed “classic GR” cars and GR-themed stickers (if we can get these produced at a reasonable price, we’ll try and include them).

Further Information

We were pleased to hear that nearly 10% of the survey respondents would be willing to contribute for a premium-priced (£100-£150) “Collector’s Edition” of GeneRally 2 – and we’ll have some details on what we have in store for that very soon (as we definitely want it to be worth your contribution, and something that will be truly special). If only those 10% contribute at the proposed funding level, and all the other survey respondents funded at the basic £8 tier, we would be a sizeable way to our funding goal in no time at all!

Finally, we’re aware that some of you said you wouldn’t be able to contribute via Kickstarter because of the payment methods required, and we’re looking into options for that. We don’t want to divert potential funding away from Kickstarter during the early stages of the campaign (as it won’t count towards our funding goal) but we certainly do want to enable you to contribute in the way that’s most comfortable and viable for you!

Summary

So, again, thank you to every single one of you who contributed to the Kickstarter Survey – your responses really have made a difference to how we’re approaching both Kickstarter and the ongoing development of GeneRally 2.

We’ll have more news for you in the coming days as we ramp up to launch (we’ve even pulled ourselves away from the screen and stuck our faces in front of the camera for a Kickstarter ‘introduction’ video) and we’re truly grateful for the patience and support you, the community, have shown over the past weeks and months!

– James, Markku & Kimmo