Strike Suit Zero’ Postmortem Discusses PayPal Problems And Steam Sale Mishap

‘Strike Suit Zero’ Postmortem Discusses PayPal Problems And Steam Sale Mishap
Last October, Born Ready Games launched a Kickstarter campaign to generate the revenue needed to finish up their space combat title, Strike Suit Zero .

. The campaign was successfully funded, collecting $174,804 and surpassing their $100,000 goal. On January 23rd, Strike Suit Zero was released. Since then there have been two DLC releases, modding tools implemented, and Oculus Rift support began last week. Today on Reddit, Born Ready Games posted a postmortem of the Kickstarter campaign.

The postmortem examined what went well with the campaign, and the difficulties that Born Ready Games were faced with.

One of the first difficulties Born Ready Games faced was with PayPal. “It went live way too late and was difficult to manage,” Born Ready Games says in the postmortem. “It was put together in a rush and nobody in the studio had proper experience with it. This was a missed opportunity and had we had it up and running earlier the impact on the overall campaign could have been much larger.” Utilizing a PayPal transaction method allows potential donors to pledge money from their PayPal account if an individual wishes to avoid using their credit card. The PayPal implementations came just three days before the Kickstarter campaign ended.

Another problem that arose was the pricing model that Born Ready Games used for Strike Suit Zero . As a funding reward, Born Ready Games offered backers the game at an “early-bird” price of $15, for the first 1,000 who chose the base retail tier. Once those 1,000 slots were filled, backers who wanted to pay for just the base game could only attain it at the $20 price tier, which was the price the game was planned to release for. As a light bonus for paying for the game before it came out, at retail price, Born Ready Games provided those $20-tier backers with Strike Suit Zero desktop/smartphone wallpapers.

However, when it came time to release Strike Suit Zero on Steam, Born Ready Games realized that the 20% discount that accompanies games on launch, would knock the base game down to $16, a dollar more than what they charged for the “early-bird” backers. The community, understandably, was a little upset over this. “…we got criticized by some backers,” the postmortem explains, “who were feeling that they were being punished when they had backed the project before anyone and should been treated better. It felt even more painful as they felt the game was almost ready before the campaign and would have launched without their support (they were wrong on this, but that was their perception).”

Luckily for Born Ready Games , it was not a total community mutiny. “There was also strong support from another part of the backer community which answered the criticism better than the studio could have and basically said they were fine with what happened with the pricing as “Kickstarter is about crowdfunding, not about pre-ordering projects on the cheap”.”

The postmortem goes on to list other challenges and unexpected difficulties that the developers faced. Things like t-shirt delays, ordering too many soundtrack CDs, and lack of stretch goals are discussed. On a positive note, there were some unexpected benefits the team encountered during the campaign: the developers discovered they had a great community manager and PR teams, the team got to see first-hand that the community wanted Strike Suit Zero to be a success as much as they did, and more.

Everything is broken down in the postmortem posted to Reddit. There are even some fancy chartsthat can be observed, if walls of text just are not your thing.

Visit Strike Suit Zero’s website, and follow the developers on Twitter.