Kickstarter Update #84 - Preorder, Modes, and Launch Update

In reference to digital backer rewards compared (in value) to excusivity, to be fair, if it is the case that things like OSTs or pdf versions of the artbook will be free online sooner rather than later, isn't that also the case with "exclusive" content? Like, say 505 had never gone back on the exclusivity thing and the IGA boss and Swordwhip were still only given to original 60 dollar backers rather than 28 backers or new folks, If that were so, it would be pretty easy for modders to just unlock them and then give them to everyone for free, or for the "backer exclusive" version of the game to end up on torrent sites, depending on what method the devs would have used to gate the content. It may have taken more time to rip in-game content than it would be to make copies of the OST or artbook pdfs, but not by very much--these days, I would give pirates only a week at most to completely bypass any attempt at digital gatekeeping. So it's not obvious to me why or how the exclusivity of the special boss or swordwhip necessarily outweighs the value of a digital OST, retro strategy guide, and (potentially) pdf of the artbook.

My main man :purify: mentioned to Arikado  that I had brought up possibly giving 60 dollar backers a pdf version of the artbook to make up for the swordwhip and boss no longer being exclusive (at the moment it's only a softcover and hardcover available to higher tiers). The reason I mention this is that such rewards are common among other kickstarters and are generally held to be a good deal. For instance, I also backed Blasphemous, and they offered a pdf of their game's artbook as well:







As you can see, the 40 dollar tier offers a pdf of the artbook, along with a variety of other digital rewards (namely alpha builds and access to backer-only parts of the discord, which ended up being sort of a pain in the butt for everyone, but that's a longer story). That's a 15 dollar difference to the lower tier, which was 25 dollars for the game, soundtrack, and access (I think) to some backer-only parts of the discord. No Blasphemous backer I'm aware of has ever complained that the Blasphemous artbook pdf will be available for free in pretty short order. Thus, it seems to me a reasonable compromise: A pdf of the Bloodstained artbook would have at least 10 dollars of value given the comparative prices of the Blasphemous tiers I just mentioned (a 15 dollar difference beween the 25 and 40 tiers), and that isn't even mentioning how the Bloodstained artbook will probably be bigger and have more famous artists represented in it (such as Mana <3) than the Blasphemous one. And it doesn't take away from the value of the higher tiers either, since actual physical artbooks have an inherent value to them that pdfs lack. Again, to take the Blasphemous example, the 60 dollar tier (which I got, by the by) provides a printed version of the artbook, indicating that physical copies of an artbook are worth 20 dollars more than digital ones, and about 30 dollars in and of themselves overall (if we take a digital copy of the book to be worth 10).

So, let's compare what backers would be getting under my suggestion:

28 dollar backers:

Game, plus soundtrack (10$), plus IGA content (10$) mean they'd have to pay a total of 48 dollars to get a comparable amount of content, straight-up.

40 dollar retail buyers:

They get a 15 dollar steelbook, so let's add that as a credit and say they're paying 25 dollars for the game. Plus 10 bucks for the soundtrack and 10 bucks for the IGA content, let's say they end up paying 45 dollars to get what they want.

Now, 60 dollar backers under the Gunlord Plan:

Let's say they're getting 28 dollars of value for the game (since that's what the 28 backers got), plus 10 dollars of value for the IGA content and 10 dollars of value for the OST. So they're at 48 dollars of value right now, which still put them underwater by 12 dollars. But then let's add in the 10 dollars of value for the strategy guide PDF, which puts them at 58 dollars of value. They're still behind by 2 dollars, but if we add in 10 dollars (at least) for a pdf of the artbook, they get a total of 68 dollars worth of value, which seems quite reasonable to me. And again, if you want to say that pdfs of the strategy guide and the prospective artbook wouldn't be worth anything because they'll be available for free online, you can say the same thing about the "exclusive" content, which would have been extracted by miners and/or pirates in very short order.

The nice thing about this plan is that 505 and Artplay could very easily implement it. Making the drawings for an artbook due to the hard work of the arists is the hard part. Once you've got that down, making a pdf is easy-peasy and oughtn't require more than a couple of days of work (at the VERY most) from an Artplay employee. So it seems like an easy way to smooth some ruffled feathers around here and get things back on track.

Can... can I be excited as hell to play this game?