Huge wall of text so
TL;DR: No more $2 or $5 tiers, doing away with polls, and slightly updated wording on remaining tiers to be accurate.
Ello, I wrote to you guys a while back asking for your thoughts on some changes I had been considering for the rewards here on Patreon. The gist of it is that the monthly polls have become kind of a barrier/roadblock for me in terms of motivation and creativity, and based on what you guys have been saying, it sounds like doing away with them won't make anyone *too* upset. So for the sake of myself, I have decided to revise the tiers on Patreon.
Right now there are 4 tiers. When I first made my Patreon, I didn't really know what to do or how to structure it, so I just made things up based on what others were doing. Now that I have more experience, I feel its a good time to restructure so I can feel more attuned to my page, and tailor it more to my needs.
To summarize, the current tier + reward system is setup like this:
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OLD
$1: 1,236 patrons
- Access to Work in Progress screenshots, or things I normally don't post on Twitter.
- Access to Mega Drive archive (720p).
$2: 147 patrons
- Access to monthly picture polls.
$5: 63 patrons
- Access to monthly animation polls.
$10: 810 patrons
- Access to 1080p, non-watermarked content.
- Access to Mega Drive archive (1080p content + project files!)
- Access to Discord server where you can see sneak peeks of stuff I'm working on
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As you can see, there's a huge gap between the $1 tier and the $10 tier, with most people picking one of those options, and very few people (by comparison) picking the $2 or $5 tiers. That tells me that there is a large amount of people who just want to donate a buck and help out, while also getting a drive link and an occasional WIP post, and on the other end, a lot of people who want to see the high quality, non-watermarked content, have access to project files and see sneak peaks on discord.
To me, that makes me feel like those tiers don't provide very good value for the price + reward. And it makes me feel like people who have picked those rewards, aren't getting very much out of them. I feel kind of similarly with the $1 tier, as I haven't been good at posting WIPs on here, because it's just way easier to do on Discord.
With that said, here is my revised tier + rewards system that I plan to replace the current one with at some point soon (not sure when):
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NEW
$1:
- Access to Mega Drive archive (720p)
- Occasional work-in-progress posts of new content
$10:
- Access to FULL QUALITY, non-watermarked content!
- Access to Mega Drive archive (full quality content + project files!)
- Access to Discord server where you can see sneak peeks of stuff I'm working on
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To summarize, I've cut the $2 and $5 tiers as I am doing away with the polls. In addition, I reworded the reward in the $1 tier about access to WIPs and cut the vaguely worded "things I normally don't post on Twitter". I also updated the wording in the $10 tier to reflect the fact that I export in higher quality than 1080p, usually 2k or higher.
With this new structure, I personally feel like the page here is more focused and a lot easier for me to manage, to ensure no one is left cheated out of rewards. I also want to encourage more people willing to support to pick the $10 tier because it's the most fun for me to manage, and I think it offers the best value for fans (though I also recognize not everyone wants to spend that much, which is why the $1 option will stick around).
Some will argue that taking away options is a bad choice, but I just don't know what kind of rewards to add to the tiers that I can see myself managing consistently. These changes are being made to make me feel more comfortable in how I operate the page, and I hope you can see my reasoning behind them.
Now I'm not sure what happens when the $2 tier and $5 tier are removed, are people who are currently pledged to those tiers going to be put into the $1 tier or will they just be cancelled all together? If anyone has any insight into this, feel free to chime in.
Thanks for reading, have a good day ( ' - ')