I have seen many indie games making money for development using crowd funding (Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, et cetera). Some of the games will offer something back. For example, in an RPG game, you might get an NPC character based on you. Some other projects simply give you the final version for free.
Apart from actually finishing the game, which is probably the main reason why anyone would want to give you the money, what should my reward strategy be?
First of all you obviously need a game that people would want to play. Without that, no matter what you offer you will likely not get much support. So lets assume you have such a game and now you want to attract people.
Looking at the most successful game projects on Kickstarter (like Torment: Tides of Numenera or Planetary Annihilation) you will see a common pattern:
full game for some basic pledge (about 15-25$) - this is the bread and butter and kind of obvious. You simply offer the game for "retail" price.
full game + some goodies (soundtrack, artwork, developer diary) for a bit larger pledge - might not be the best thing for an indie game (i doubt you are going to bring a world class composer to make a soundtrack for you, but hey, who knows?) but you can still consider this.
full game + goodies + slight involvement in development - now this is what you should probably definetly do. Allow the early backers to get into some "backers only" forum where you can discuss game design, where they can come up with suggestions etc. A bit of a higher pledge should ensure you will get only people seriously interested in your game which will not flood your forums with bad ideas.
full game + goodies + more involvement in development - allow them to name characters or something, add them to credits. Many people like this kind of things and are willing to pledge quite a bit of money. And its also a nice thing to do.
full game + goodies + early alpha/beta access - this is pretty much self explanatory. If someone is willing to invest so much into your project you should really allow him to see the product as soon as possible so he can see how good his investment was!
Obviously, depending on the size of your project some things might not be doable for you, but i think the general idea is clear. If you can also have some stretch goals which will up the tension as the funding campaign progresses that can help a lot too.
Best of luck!
I don't have hard data to back this up, but I firmly believe that offering a copy of the game as a reward is actually a bad plan from a long-term perspective. It can effectively soft-caps your sales, and since it's often the lowest reward level, similarly restrict your capital.
The Kickstarter (or what have you) campaign will act as a marketing push for your product, through which you'll generate some word-of-mouth and a grassroots fan base. If you offer what is essentially a pre-order, then you're burning a huge portion of that grassroots activism because your game isn't actually available yet, and you won't let that interest reach its full potential. Thus, you'll have a localized clique of fans who are very interested now, drive some "sales," but then don't gain you a whole lot until the game ships months later, and which point they may have mostly moved on and won't be as likely to help drive actual sales.
Additionally, offering pre-sales as a donation reward restricts a lot of your flexibility in adjusting your initial sale price to help cover and cost overruns you will have inevitably had during development.
To offset some of the "sticker shock" potential donators may feel by not having a pre-sale reward, you could offer to make their donation "count" towards the purchase of the final product when it ships (although this will likely involve management overhead on your part to support).
Obviously, the ideal reward in a crowd-funding pitch costs you much less than it costs the donator. Ideally it costs you nothing, but that's impractical once you factor in the opportunity cost of your time. You also want to eek the most value out of that donator's mindshare, so things that can keep them engaged during the development cycle are good.
Cheap things you can offer involve things you already have to do yourself (mainly oriented around content creation):
Naming NPCs after donators or putting their likeness in the game is simple and easy and can make a lot of people happy.
Have them help design a puzzle, or quest, or item, or enemy (Mercury didn't do quite this, but does thrive on user-supplied content).
If your game has a server-side component or some place you can store account data, allow donators to have unique avatars or other special effects. Guild Wars 1 shipped with a Collector's Edition that gave you glowing hands when you would emote, and a lot of people were sad that the sequel didn't have a similar feature. A little bling can go a long way.
Capturing the mindshare of donators throughout development is important not only to build hype and anticipation, but to ensure they convert into actual paying customers on launch, and to keep them active as potential word-of-mouth influencers during and post launch.
Allowing donators of a certain level access to internal forums or a stream of private development updates can keep people engaged while you work. You'll probably want to make sure there is at least a EULA, some basic legal protection, in place so you don't get embroiled in a lawsuit that you "stole the idea" of somebody who posted it on your forums (this is why professional game developers don't accept unsolicited "ideas" and such in the mail).
You can also consider allowing donators at a certain level early access to the game, just be aware you could run into a piracy issue. This can be extremely useful since you get ongoing feedback as you iterate, which can really help shape the game in a positive fashion.
I would avoid offers rewards of a physical nature unless they are very simple to product (like stickers). Anything that will incur a manufacturing cost and administrative time on your part probably aren't your best bet; you have to pass those costs on to your donators and you rarely end up with very high-quality results.
Above all, try to tailor your rewards to what is unique or compelling about your game in some fashion. It's hard to provide many suggestions without knowing more about your game, but making sure the rewards jive with the brand and feel of the game itself can really help establish a firm bond between the donator and your project which will help keep them interested and more likely to spread the word around.
I've made some reasearch on few game projects in Kickstarter. I have picked smaller projects on purpose, something doable in few people, or in a single person. These are all recently successfuly funded projects. I haven't found any successfuly funded projects that don't offer the digital copy, so I picked a project that as one of its goal has to release the game for free. I looked into other projects as well, but as PeterK said, there is a pattern.
1. A.N.N.E
4,113 Backers, $100,272 pledged of $70,000 goal
2. Among the Sleep
8,110 Backers, $248,358 pledged of $200,000 goal
3. Bitcrobes 52 Backers, $813 pledged of $660 goal
Conclusion
From this mini-research I'd say that for a game that will be released and sold for some retail price, the rewards should be (in order of "popularity times money"):
For a game that is released for free, the order changes and point 4. will be no.1. The rest will probably stay the same (excl. the digital copy).
To summarize answers from the others
Let's face it, people who back your project probably only want one thing:
In the case of a video game it is a optimal reward since the cost per digital download, for you, the developer, is nearly 0. This should be your basic reward, everything above should just be extras for those who want to fund you more.
Some viable extras would be:
I would avoid any physical rewards since they cost you money and time and there isn't that much interest in those.
Here is the numbers from Prison Architect, they implemented a crowd-funding model and are still in Alpha and already have raised over $3.4 million
http://www.introversion.co.uk/prisonarchitect/
(Overall: $3,460,225)
Base Pack ($30): (Included Alpha Access) 89,811 Sold - $2,694,330 (Greenlighted on Steam now)
Aficionado ($35): (Includes Alpha Access, PDF of Prison Architect Art book, and a download of the Official Sound Track.) , all previous tiers of donation rewards- 3,841 Sold ( $134,435 )
Introversioner ($40): Get all four Introversion games, all previous tiers of donation rewards 6,689 Sold - $267,560
Name in the Game ($50): One of the prisoners named after you, all previous tiers of donation rewards 5,945 Sold - $297,250
Physical Pleasures ($100): special limited edition Game DVD and Soundtrack CD, a Poster, T-shirt
Digital-Immorto-Criminalise Your Face (100 max) ($250): Not only a character named after you, but you also get the artist to design a entire character to look like you, all previous tiers of donation rewards - 63 Sold - $15,750
Shake it like a Polaroid Picture (20 max)($500): Same as above tier however you'll be used in a in-game scenario/campaign as well, all previous tiers of donation rewards - 17 Sold - $8,500
Warden Norton I presume? (5 max)($1000): Remember the Civ V world leaders that each bring a special world ability? Not content with your own prisoner likeness, and custom polaroid? Come in at this level and you'll also get to design the warden. There will be five wardens in game and the player will have to choose which one to use each time. One of these will be designed by you and us and have a special feature or buff that we'll work together to figure out. As if that isn't worth the price tag alone you also get....every......other......tier. 6 Sold - $6,000 Oops :)
I think this is a great example of pricing tiers, rewards and how far a community will go to get behind a game they are really truely excited about. Chris the lead developer / only programmer i'm aware of from a 3 person team, even came out and blatently said "we have no idea how long we'll be in alpha phase, quite a long time i'm sure."
Not to mention Introversion although quite famous among cult circles, is fairly unknown to the general population and about as Indie as you can get. At the time they started Prison Architect KickStarter was not available for use in the UK so they designed their own crowd funding model. And in a interview Chris stated that it felt morally wrong and borderline lying, to use kick starter as Kickstarter "mission" is to get a project off the ground and running, and Prison Architect already had been worked on and near an alpha state by the time Kickerstarter was available in the UK.
For start you should always have some kind of demo and story behind your game. If you just want to "create a game" that is nice but very doubtful.
If you, on the other hand, come with a really interesting demo, a very nice designed trailer and few main ideas that you are planning to use in your story then people will definitely wish to support that. If people are not supporting it, then it is not good enough, so go back to the whiteboard and create something even more awesome.
It mainly depends on what kind of game it is.
But one thing that always works is rewards which are about visual enhancements. Skins/Dyes/Character equipment
This is good because it doesn't affect game play and imbalance the game for players who are not rewarded and keeps things interesting and competitive.
Make sure that the items/skins are unique and limited.
