I'm considering using Indiegogo to raise money for my project. I've been self-financing up until now, but it slow going. So the hope is to raise funds to bring in outside help. This leaves me with a decision regarding what to offer as an incentive to potential sponsors. One of the ideas is to offer advance copies of the game or a special edition version. This raises the question of how this work.
The game is almost far enough along to submit to Steam to get green lit (just not there yet). But at some point it will get Steam approval. This means I will need to get a bunch of keys to send to contributors. How does that work? The keys will also need some sort of identifier to tell the game that 'this person is contributor, so turn on the incentives'.
One other question -- I'm doing the development using the UE4 engine. Epic has a test Steam cloud Id to tinker with, but it's rather limited and crippled. Can you get a game ID from Steam ahead of being green lit so that the full cloud interface can be developed and tested?
I'd be interested in hearing about anyone's experience using Indiegogo and what pitfalls they ran into. Suggestions for incentives are also welcome.
