Survey 2022 Results! | Patreon Weekly #149

Hey Patrons!

Firstly, there’s a new poll running! This one covers some options for additional side content in v1.3.0!

For this weekly, I’m going to go over the results of the recent rewards survey, and some plans I’m forming for changes to the Patreon.

Survey Results

In total the survey was completed by 53 patrons and gives me a nice picture of how the current rewards are valued, thank you very much for participating! As I alluded to previously, the main point of this survey was for me to have a good idea of what you guys value the most, in preparation for doing a refresh of the Patreon and its rewards.

Things have changed a lot since the start of this Patreon and the initial concepting of its rewards back in 2019 and 2020. I am now in a much stronger financial situation, Shattered’s playerbase has grown massively, and there are more expectations than ever on Shattered’s quality. This has shifted the balance of how much time I should be spending on Patreon rewards versus working on Shattered Pixel Dungeon itself.

However, I also don’t want to pull the rug out from under you guys and no matter how big Shattered gets the Patreon will continue to be extremely valuable to me in unique ways thanks to its dedicated community. With that in mind, I want to try and prioritize being more efficient about how I deliver rewards, over just removing them.

This is a big reason why I ran the survey in the first place, to get a better idea of which rewards should get more or less time commitment. Here’s a summary of how that went, plus my early plans based on them:

• Firstly, I am not planning any significant changes to Patreon Polls(4.1/5), Reward Pins (3.7/5), Weeklies(3.4/5), or the Discord(2.7/5). All of these rewards were either highly rated or have significant value to me for their community interaction. The most I might do is look into some ways for me to streamline my writing process for weeklies and polls, and to more consistently interact on the Discord.
• Betas(3.8/5) also got pretty strong support, but aren’t actually a reward we’ve unlocked yet (the Patreon has been wavering at a bit below $650/mo for a while). Previously I suggested that Patrons would get special limited builds of the game, but I think it would work better instead for Patrons to get full beta access a few days before updates hit the public beta. This not only makes it easier for me to offer the reward, but also makes it substantially more valuable to me as Patrons will be more effectively able to hunt for early bugs. I’ve even already been doing this unofficially for the last few updates.
• Audio Q&As(2.8/5) and Shattered Secrets(2.6/5) are both relatively less popular (The rating for Secrets is only from $10+ Patrons). I don’t currently have a final plan for them yet, as I’d like to not just remove them outright, but I will be looking for ways to significantly reduce the time commitment for producing them. For now, I’m going to spend less time prepping and editing the audio Q&As, and I’m going to look into making Shattered Secrets re-appear as regular weeklies once a certain amount of time passes.

On a final note, you guys rated the overall rewards at 4.2/5, and the current post frequency at 4.25/5. You also had no major suggestions for new rewards, with the vast majority of people either saying nothing or actively writing some variety of ‘we already have plenty’. I’m very happy that you guys are satisfied with the rewards overall, and I hope that these adjustments don’t change that too much. As always, I’m happy to listen to your thoughts, so please let me know if you have any further feedback you want to give on this!