Anyone who's been keeping an eye on the Utopian IndieGogo campaign, may have noticed that they've added more time for their campaign to reach its fixed goal of $35,000. I know that previously, there were only a couple of days left until the campaign was finished, but now it's still going to be running for another 35 days.
I'm not too sure if this is going to be enough, since donations seem to have almost stopped coming in. Luckily they've made some changes to the perks that are being offered, but at the same time, previous perks seem to have completely disappeared as well.
As you can see here, they've now opted to switch towards offering certain premium features to people who pledge certain amounts. This is quite a difference with the previous rewards that were on offer.
Now there's talk of fees that the new Utopian Colony platform will charge and by pledging you can eliminate those fees for one year. I'm not sure if i'm a big fan of this new approach and I don't know if this will actually entice more people to donate now.
Making these drastic changes to the perks, after people have already donated doesn't seem like the best strategy to me. I personally have my doubts that this will cause this project to succeed, even with the additional time this campaign will stay open for crowdfunding.
Now, when I checked my current donation to the Utopian Colony campaign, it seems that my current pledge is still there with the rewards that I had chosen when I made the pledge. If they still deliver everything they've promised to previous backers, I don't see any problem. It's just a little bit weird that they've removed all the other perks, that's all.
I think that those new perks might be more geared towards getting existing open-source projects to join in. I don't know, it's just pure speculation at my end, I just thought it was interesting to report on this.
Aside from changing the perks, they've also completely changed the way they present their campaign on IndieGogo. I think it's all much clearer now for people who've never heard about Utopian in the past.
Their FAQ page has received a big revamp and they've also created a better video where they explain what Utopian does. I hope that these changes will generate some interest from open-source projects that are not yet familiar with Utopian.
It does seems that the previous rewards are still available on their Fundition campaign, so anyone who's still interested in those can use Fundition to donate.
