The GURPS PDF Kickstarter Completes Today

The GURPS PDF Challenge Kickstarter ends today. If you're at all interested in getting those 12 PDFs for $3 and you have not already pledged, this is your last chance to do so.

With that out of the way, especially given that a lot of you will see this after the fact, let's do what I enjoy most, and dive into the numbers!

I've been following the project with Kicktraq, a nice little site that shows you the trends of the project, how well it did, and breaks down the daily backing of the project.  At this moment, we're trending towards about $55,000 which has been my prediction for a few days now, though if you'd asked me earlier in the project, I would have guess $45,000, which is probably what they thought the project would end at.  The updates suggest that this project exceeded expectations at all points, and assuming this is genuine and not just meant as typical marketing hype about how great your project is, it looks like the idea was to draw the last few dollars out of people with DF 21, and have this exciting finale that climaxed, at the last moment, with the unlocking of DF 21. Instead, we unlocked that days ago, and we've been coasting since.

The thing I've found the most interesting is this:

This is a break down by day of the amount of pledges.  Now, we usually expect that surge of initial investment, and the first two days literally account for more than half of all the money invested.  That's typical, I think, of the L-shaped curve of kickstarter projects.  A lot of people argue for a "halfpipe-shaped curve," where you get another increasing surge towards the end of a project, though some call that a myth (I can't find the article, but he argues it has more to do with marketing than a project finishing). As we neared completion, I speculated that we might get a surge of new backers pledging $3, and that's exactly what we saw. You can see above the sudden surge of pledges on the 9th, when the 12th PDF unlocked.  But here's an even more interesting chart:

 This is backers per day.  Now, if you run the numbers, you'll see that the average pledge level is about $20.  On the 8th (the day before the 12th PDF unlocked), the 19th and the 10th, it fell dramatically to $14-15 per pledge. I think a lot of people, once we'd unlocked most or all of the PDFs (or there were a lot of people who REALLY liked the idea of Megadungeons), only then did they feel justified in dropping the $3 pledge specifically. If so, I feel like that's very human, to see an offer of "up to 12 PDFs for $3," and while realizing that one PDF for $3 is already a good deal, they imply a promise of 12 PDFs, and anything less feels like they're trying to cheat you.  Some argue that you always see a spike when a project funds, but I note it funded in the first hour or so.  Everything since has been stretch goals: you would have gotten something regardless of whether or not the last PDF unlocked.  But even so, for a lot of people, that last PDF didn't feel like a "final stretch goal" but a prerequisite to backing the project.

As an aside, it seems that the last day, thus far, has a very high average pledge of $28.  Perhaps we have some late comers jumping onto that great $99 deal?

Anyway, this has been a fun ride.  We're over 2500 backers, and I hope SJGames gets this out to us sooner than the promised November, as I'd like to review the 12 PDFs.  I'll see you on the other side!