2022 Big Patreon Survey - Results and important upcoming changes! (Patreon)

Hello Patrons,

Thanks once again if you were able to fill out our big survey a few weeks ago. We’ve spent a lot of time as a team thinking about what you’ve said and your feedback has been very helpful.

Below are the important changes we will be making over the coming weeks and months.

If you are interested, you will find a summary of key results from the survey questions further down this update.

We hope that the vast majority of you will be happy about the changes we are making and regret that we can't make it perfectly suit all of you.  

We are extremely grateful for your support up to this point!

General marketing effort

Rebrand

We will shortly be renaming the project Anvil Digital Bits Box to place more emphasis on what makes us unique - modular components and digital conversion parts.

MyMiniFactory

We will be listing all our content on MMF and will likely set up a Tribe, as well as look at listing our content on other websites which sell 3D files.

New Welcome Pack

We will be refreshing and updating the Welcome Pack to include a range of parts that better reflect what we offer. We will also look to expand the welcome pack over time.

Monthly Themes

We will be taking a slightly more focused approach to our themes.

The three key areas which appeal to the vast majority of you are

• Gothic Sci-Fi
• Futuristic Sci-Fi (i.e most Sci-Fi not of a gothic nature)
• Modern Day/Post-Apocalypse

These broad themes will appeal to people who play games including 40k, Necromunda, Zona Alpha, Stargrave and similar, which we know from the survey, is the vast majority of you.

Going forward, we will ensure that each month's theme provides some content for at least one of these three broad areas above, ideally with some cross over.

This means it’s less likely we will be featuring historical themed content. We also won't be doing vehicles/larger kits (with one possible upcoming exception) as part of the core offering, but will look at developing them as growth rewards or for separate sale.

Format

It depends on the theme ideas we come up with, but we anticipate doing 2 double months per year with 8 single theme months.

We will continue to offer a full selection of separate, modular components as our core offering. We will also provide fully assembled models where it is feasible/optimal to do so.

We will include occasional scatter terrain and ‘characters’ where appropriate but will tend more toward more modular infantry parts in most months.

Going forward we will include both Supported and Unsupported files in a single download.

Price and Tiers

We are going to keep just one tier for the time being and focus on efforts to attract more Patrons with better marketing.

We are planning to close the current $9 tier to new patrons in the next few days, and replace it with a $10 tier in line with a lot of other Patreons.

If you stay subscribed, you’ll continue to pay $9 for the time being.

If you are willing/happy to switch to the $10 tier voluntarily, we would obviously appreciate it.

Options for a possible second tier and Loyalty/growth rewards

The survey results didn't point to an obvious way forward, so we are going to be giving these possible elements more thought, and will likely trial a few different things over the coming months.

We work a few months ahead as much as we can, so development work for the next few months is already well underway and any significant changes will not be until later in the year.

Look out for some hopefully exciting announcements soon!

Feel free to leave us feedback in the comments, on Discord, or if you prefer by private message.

Thanks for your support!

Team Anvil

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Selected more detailed survey results

Scale

Almost all of you play 28/32mm (no surprise) but over 20% of you play games at 15mm scale, so we are going to experiment with some dedicated 15mm versions of our models.

Games

A lot of you play 40k/Necromunda, but we also had a really strong show of hands for Stargrave, Zona Alpha and similar sci-fi skirmish games, so we will be taking a closer look at those rulesets in the studio!

Broad Themes

The first big surprise - The least popular general category was Fantasy miniatures, BUT the highest polling result was for Fantasy miniatures with options designed to make them suitable for use in Sci-fi - we will keep this in mind and look at how we can make fantasy miniatures which cross over into the sci-fi themes above.

80% of you still collect physical miniatures as well as 3D printing.

80% of you support at least one other Patreon project.

Base Price

Over 70% of you would happily pay more for the same level of content - Thanks for your vote of confidence!

Almost all of you are kit bashing with our parts - a good mix of digital and real world kit bashing - awesome to see our modular parts are being enjoyed!

Pre-Supports

Pre-Supported parts are used by a big majority of you some or all of the time, but there is still strong support for an unsupported version so we will continue to supply one.

Multi-Shell

Lots of you make use of the functionality, but an alarmingly high % of particularly new users didn’t know what it meant. We will make some quality instructional videos so you can all start making the most of Multi-Shell components.

Blender

About 50% of you have already downloaded Blender and learned some basics. That's huge, so we will definitely consider more Blender based content options.

Female Miniatures

Our studio team strongly believes that realistic female miniatures are important and should be included where relevant. Over 80% of you agree with us, which is great!

Characters

Only about 6% of you think that character models are very important, while about 35% would be happy with just modular upgrade parts, so we will place a little less emphasis on characters going forward.

Scatter Terrain

20% of you think scatter terrain is very important, vs 30% who don't want it and would prefer more miniatures.

Double Months

A huge 80% of you are in favour of occasional double months! Coming right up!

Changes to the Tiers

This was a tough call. Lots of you would be very happy to sign up for a more expensive tier with extra content, however, lots of you would also be disappointed.

In both the options we polled (Modular and single piece $15 tiers) we crunched the numbers and would likely make some extra money, but we would also then be committed to more work each month, and it's likely it would roughly cancel out, leaving us in the much the same place.

The plan for now is to include single piece models where relevant, but also all the individual parts, in one $10 tier

We will have to be a little more realistic about how much ‘extra’ stuff like character models and terrain we can include, but we can expand the offering as the project hopefully grows.

Loyalty Rewards

We would in theory like to offer some kind of loyalty scheme, but doing it in a way which is a manageable amount of extra work, relative to the extra income, isn't straightforward, so we think about it more and keep it under review.

If you made it this far, thanks once again for your time helping us improve the project!