Matt wrote: So, to prevent this being just backslapping, how long did it take? What were the breakdowns in donation timing and do you know what influenced them?

Well, as I said on the ransom model page, I'm hardly a statistician, but some peaks and valleys were pretty obviously related to other events. Among those valleys were the three weeks following the holiday season. Among the spikes were the modest jump in donations and HUGE jump in activity after posting some new artwork. As for any relationship between activity and donations? It's hard to say. Obviously, the first step in getting people to donate is to get them to the site. At no point did the whole dollar amount of donations exceed the number of visitors.

I'd be really curious to see what the average donation was per donor, not counting the anomalies like the donor from Texas who paid over a hundred bucks. Greg's got all the financial information for the project, however, since it's his paypal account that has been receiving the donations.

Valamir wrote: could you begin to speculate on which of these was most critical to the model not only working, but working early?

I can't speak for Greg, but I think it was a combination of these things (including "something else" ;) ) that helped this project succeed. I know Greg posted a couple things on the rpgnet forums, and I shamelessly blitzkrieg-ed my regular online hangouts and personal blog. I also directed the owner of my local game shop to the site, just to get the meme infected there too. Finally, I've got some good friends in Dev Purkayastha and Shreyas Sampat. Dev mentioned to me personally that he talked up the game to his friends around the time we got a couple donations from Harvard. Coincidence? I think not. :)

As for the buzz, I think a lot of that was generated more by the ransom model than Meatbot Massacre itself. Much like Stephen King's serialized e-book "the Plant" got more exposure for its distribution model than for whether the book itself was any good. (Was it good? I never read it.) I have a very restricted source of site stats, so I was unable to gather information on referrers. If I were able to, I'd know which areas yield the most hits, if not the most donations.

Name recognition was a crucial component, of course. I certainly wouldn't have been able to put up anything for ransom on my name alone, so I've been thinking about how viable this would be for indie publishers. This is my idea... A central website for all ongoing ransom projects with continuously updated information about ransoms, author profiles, preview art galleries, community forums, and, most relevant, author ratings and comments. Much like eBay allows people to comment on whether a particular auctioner is reliable, this theoretical website would be the seed for future name recognition in the gaming community. I can see authors releasing free or low-ransom material to get some personal buzz started for themselves, but with a hero project being their big whammy.

Besides that, I'm sure (at least I hope) people donated because they hadn't seen a concept like this executed in tactical miniature games before. I mean, in what other game do you run the risk of your mech pooping out the pilot? XD

Valamir wrote: Obviously, all hard to answer based on a single experience, but I'd appreciate any thoughts you have in those directions.

Right. I think it would take many more ransoms with different deadlines from different authors of different projects to get a complete picture of not only how successful the ransom model is, but how to execute it better. I've no doubt that if this model catches on, someone clever out there will come up with a formula or intriguing twist to the model that will blow previous performance out of the water.