Crowd Funding and that magical 5%

[DoubleP90]

@Noland;8309

Hi Skorbut,

There isn’t a binary answer, it depends on how your tiers are set up. No royalties are due on donations or T-shirts / posters, only tiers tied to product access. However, for those tiers, it would be due on the gross revenue from backers, before Kickstarter/Amazon’s cut.

With that in mind, you can budget the royalty as well as the crowdfunding/payment processing fees, cost of rewards, and any government taxes when calculating how much you’d need to ask for.

From the FAQ (Häufig gestellte Fragen - Unreal Engine):

What if my product obtains crowdfunding via Kickstarter or another source?

Royalties are due on revenue from Kickstarter or other crowdfunding sources when the revenue is actually attributable to your product, for example if the user is required to purchase a particular funding package to obtain access (now or later) to your product, or if that package gives the buyer benefits within the product such as in-game items or virtual currency.

Here’s an example of what we mean by “attributable”: Assume you provide two tiers of offers, a signed poster for $20, and a signed poster plus game access for $50. No royalties are due on ancillary products like posters, so no royalty is due on the $20 tier. On the $50 tier, the user is paying for the poster with a $20 value, and that implies that the remaining $30 of value is attributable to the product. So, for each $50 tier sale, you’d pay a royalty of $1.50 (5% of $30).

Cheers,
Noland

I have some additional quesitons:

1. Do we have to pay royalties if we offer alpha/beta only access and not the full game?
2. Example:
   Tier nr1 (price 10$) offers a t-shirt (no-royalties)
   Tier nr2 (price 20$) offers t-shirt+ game access (royalties on 10$ which is assumed as value of the game)
   Tier nr3 (price 1000$) offers a t-shirt+ game access+ name of the backer in the credits as producer (game access still valued at 10$ and name in credits valued as 980$)
   From what I understand we would pay only the royalty on the 10$ of the game as the “name in the credits” doesn’t add any benefits or value in the game, the same would apply to a “dinner with the developers” or “visit of the game studios”.
   Am I understanding correctly?