It's fairly common knowledge that trees are pretty handy to have around. If we wanted to I'm sure we could be cliche and give you a buncha statistics all about how the planet needs more trees. We could...and we will! Sneak statistics attack!
Statistics Alert:
The destruction of a healthy forest system can create a cascade of problems. Trees help provide a habitat for animals, purify water systems, help control flooding or erosion, and help replenish the soil with nutrients. In Madagascar, only 10% of its original forests remain today. In Haiti, a mere 2% of its land is forested. In Nepal, 70% of its population is forest dependent and yet less than 30% of its forests remain.
Now to resume your regularly scheduled announcement:
The thing is, we're not a big company with big resources - evident by the fact that our game began on Kickstarter. But as a ragtag band of indie developers, we've always been starry-eyed at the thought of our games helping serve some bigger purpose. The idea of donating a tree on behalf of every Kynseed backer is something we've wanted to do since the start of the project. However, we also knew that there was no way we'd have the resources to do that sorta thing on our own. So we began looking around for someone who could help us pull it off.
That journey led us to finding
Eden Reforestation Projects - a nonprofit organization that works directly with villages and communities suffering from extreme poverty resulting from the destruction and deforestation of land. They've been doing this for 14 years and in that time they've helped plant millions of trees. In fact, mere days ago, they just reached 200,000,000 trees planted!
Their headquarters are based in Glendora, California, which is just a hop, skip, and jump away for Los Angeles based PixelCount developer Matt. He has been working with them in what little spare time he has and we are now happy to report that we've partnered with Eden to plant literally thousands of trees on behalf of all you amazing Kynseed backers.
We're not big fans of business babble and we try to avoid it at all costs. So rather than be secretive about what this is costing us, we figured we'd just straight up tell you. Eden has been doing this a long time and their organization has some of the most passionate experts in the field. By working with them, it's going to cost us 10 cents per tree.
Flippin' crazy, right?
When we first had this idea, the main reason we never really pursued it was because of how expensive we imagined it might be. The fact is, all you backers made your pledges to support a game's development, not the humanitarian aspirations of its developers. So the cost of this sort of thing was often the reason we kept nixing the idea. But at 10 cents a tree, we were more than willing to lose such a small sliver of revenue from each pledge. That 10 cents covers the transportation of seedlings (real seedlings, not you fine folk), planting them, and then weeding them later in the season.
As we often joke about here in our announcements, we're big fans of lists. So here's another that includes some of the specifics:
- Each tree only costs us 10 cents.
- All existing backers will get a tree donated.
- All new backers will get a tree donated.
- So far, that means over 4,300 trees are getting planted!
Whether you're a Kickstarter backer or a Piggy Backer, you will get a tree planted on your behalf. Each and every new backer that Kynseed gets now and in the future, for the entire life of the crowdfunding campaign, will also get a tree planted on their behalf. As of a few days ago, our collective total of backers just hit the 4,300 mark. That means that all of you wonderful people have helped plant 4,300 trees so far. For a moment, try to imagine what that many trees looks like. Think about how crazy that is.
For each of you that plants the kynseed acorn when playing for the first time, there will exist in the real world an actual tree that you've also helped plant.
