There’s no shortage of Kickstarters for tabletop gamers, some look like sure fire successes and others have a steep high to climb from the very minute the campaign is launched. The hardest challenge, perhaps, is asking gamers to back subscription software. Neither are popular; software projects are plagued with failures and subscriptions are scary.
YARPS is a subscription to a web app and, with 15 days still on the clock, currently has 300% of the $5,000 funding goal. You can see the details and pledge at the campaign page.
To fully understand the value and the proposal of the Kickstarter, you need to understand YARPS’s pricing model. It’s not straight-forward but it does make sense.
Your cash buys you IP. You spend IP to do things.
I’ve called YARPS a subscription model but you don’t actually need to subscribe. If you take that route then you’ll need to buy your IP at full cost whenever you want to do anything on the platform that costs IP. That’s pretty much everything.
The basic (core) subscription costs €5 and that gets you 600 IP posts (if a non-subscriber spet €5 they would only get 500 IP). Any additional IP bought also gets a discount.
The premium subscription costs €10 and that gets you 1,200 IP. Any extra IP you need is bought at a bigger discount that the core subscription.
The Kickstarter premium version gets you 1,200 IP a month but no discount. Why not? Because once you’ve pledged enough on Kickstarter to unlock it, you don’t need to pay a monthly subscription.
What consumes IP? Every 100 entries in your encyclopedia costs 50 IP, every user costs 50 IP and every 2 GB of stuff in your file manager costs 50 IP.
50 IP a month will also unlock ONE of the following; automatic documentation, interactive maps, portrait generator, live session tools, music & sound, personal notebook, PDF export, customization features, custom user roles or instance community tools.
Portrait Generator
I think the Portrait Generator is an example of YARP’s potential and the coding clout of Better Than Life.
YARPS pledges
€10 gets you closed access to the beta, 5 votes for their ideas hub (which I assume is a chance to influence the roadmap – this is a good idea for a Kickstarter pledge) and an in-app supporters badge.
€20 gets you 10 votes and 3 months premium plan while €45 boosts that to 6 months, 15 votes and alpha access.
I’m not sure how alpha the project is given you can already check out the prototype.
The fact that that prototype is there and real is important. It’s helping to reassure backers that YARPS is not vapourware.
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