It's incredibly frustrating how Kickstarter is stacked so much against engineering. People are naturally drawn to good design, so the most successful Kickstarters are the ones that have the prettiest pictures and videos of enthusiastic, extroverted people who make wild guesses about what their product can do and how much it'll cost to make. It all pushes a lot of really important business and engineering decisions onto the team members who are least qualified to make those decisions.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/312084766/homesick <- designer and self-taught artist making a game for $28k
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ridergames/darkened-light-action-rpg-platform-game <- unhappy with IG Maker, hiring a programmer to rewrite it for $2500 (hint: that buys one week of my time at friends and family rate).
http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/clinendoll/blog/how-not-to-win-friends-and-influence-people-indie-/95644/ <- wow! $200 a week plus the artists already chose your tools for you.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1463653291/fortis-rex-rise-of-the-king-0 <- meet the team! $7k and no programmers. But at least they'll have great artwork.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1727119297/evocreotm-a-monster-collection-rpg-for-mobile-devi <- I wanted to make a platform game but it was too hard, so here's this ****. $2k to make a Pokemon clone.

All funded at >>100%. Basically, **** Kickstarter.

I really wish I knew good artists irl b/c there's totally room to fund an indie game on Kickstarter with a realistic budget. If you don't have pretty pictures though, you're just going to get drowned out by doomed projects from idea people.

I'm glad everything isn't like that. Just look at how well-funded Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress) is:



Nothing at all related to that game, including the website, is what I would call sleek design or pretty pictures. But it's all because they have something of substance there. The game is fun as **** and it has massive potential for updates.

$10.11 an hour.

He makes between 1/6th to 1/8th of the median gross total compensation for someone with his skills.

You may very well be correct but just repeating it doesn't help me to understand. I'd like some sort of explanation as to why a game must have a large budget to be considered a success (not that this is really the subject at hand to begin with--we're discussing the success of the crowd-funder to raise funding for the developer, not whether or not the developer will be successful in his later endeavour).





I don't know exactly what the mission statement was for Kickstarter's business plan but their FAQ indicates that they consider themselves to be a service for funding a wide variety of projects. Yet, I'm to believe that when said funding occurs, it's not a valid measurement of their success? When Subset Games asked for $10k & received $200k to create FTL, I'm not permitted to use this as an example of a successfully funded project because of the scale? You certainly raise some valid concerns but most of them appear to be beyond the scope (when there are successes within) of Kickstarter's goals (e.g. fund-raising). It's certainly reasonable to criticize them for not expanding those goals but if we're going to measure them for what they are & not what we want them to be, we should probably give credit where it's due.



If you're saying that it's Kickstarter's responsibility to ensure that each funded project delivers on its promises, I can only say that they tell developers & funders upfront in their FAQ that this isn't how it works & while it may be a valid concern (whether or not this becomes their responsibility), I don't think it's fair to measure their success based upon something that's beyond the scope of their service.








If I'm going to invest my money in a project, I'm going to familiarize myself with the basic details & in this particular case, that'd be the Kickstarter's FAQ. If a funder reads the FAQ & doesn't see how clearly Kickstarter is leaning on the position that it's the developer's reputation that's on the line (not theirs) if a project doesn't go as planned, then they probably stole mommy & daddy's credit card & are going to be in even more trouble when things don't work out. Again, I think that these concerns are valid & I would love to see the Kickstarter that you think they should be, but it's not the Kickstarter that exists & your expectations, while possibly reasonable, are beyond the scope of their current service.


I would like to see where you get your information on most of the developers failing to get funding before they tried Kickstarter. I'm not saying that it's merely an educated guess but I suspect that as crowd-funding becomes more popular (I think it will—though possibly via Kickstarter alternatives), it'll likely become the first stop for people rather than the last (assuming concerns like yours are eventually dealt with). I suspect that it already is the first stop for a lot of small projects (e.g. my friend Carly's band).





I don't think that Kickstarter will change their business model until they're forced to, like so many other businesses, but I do think it'll happen. It appears that our major disagreement merely boils down to whether or not Kickstarter's success should be measured by things that are beyond their stated scope. I agree with you about it potentially being a great model for small projects (I think it already is) & maybe not so much for large projects. I certainly don't like the idea of people investing their money & losing it to under-qualified or even unscrupulous people but in the end it's currently more like crowd-investing (with all of the risk that's typically associated with it) & less like crowd-funding (e.g. Kiva).

My inclusion of FTL, Ouya & Occulus Rift were for the purpose of showing Kickstarter's "success" in crowd-funding them. I apologize if that point wasn't clear. My position is that the actual funding that's raised via a crowd-funding service is the most important metric in measuring said service's success (not things that are beyond the stated scope of the service--such as whether or not the products succeed after Kickstarter is done with their part). I'm certainly a layman on this particular subject, so I'm open to the possibility that I'm wrong--I merely need someone to explain to me why this is so.

Ouya isn't a success until every single person who bought one has one.
Until then success is "Pending", you can argue how likely it is to succeed, but it has not yet succeeded.

Also you realize by your definition of "Success" that if I go to a store, buy a product, and then walk out of the store without my money and without my product, but I ~might~ get it in the future, that's a success.

Kickstarter didn't develop Ouya. Kickstarter was already successful in raising funds towards Ouya (their requested goal was surpassed). Therefore, Kickstarter is a success in this case (unless you're measuring things that are beyond their stated scope). Your analogy doesn't fit because Kickstarter isn't a store (you're not buying a product from Kickstarter). Their current business model shifts the rest of the responsibility on the developers of the products. It's certainly reasonable to criticise this method but it's disingenuous to ignore that it's their position & that it's beyond their stated scope.

I have experience with software development and estimation. All I can tell you here is that, in my professional opinion, most of the projects on Kickstarter are not asking for enough money to feed the development team for the duration of development, to say nothing of paying the federal minimum wage.

Let me be clear on this: I'm not talking about low-goal kickstarters like FTL. These are occasionally acceptable, when for example it's a volunteer, free-time effort and they're just looking for enough funding to outsource a few assets. But these games are not low budget; your accounting in this case will include the full price of labour as an investment from those volunteer team members which is paid back to them under the budget. "Low budget" games are the problem, because games are not low-budget things. My issue with Kickstarter is that I can tell the difference because I have the appropriate training, but backers - and often even project founders - do not.

Go ahead. Go to the list of funded projects and look at all of the funded games that don't have engineering input. I dare you to find a single one that includes "we didn't ask an engineer if this was possible with this budget" as a potential risk.

Just a lil dab of perspective here w.r.t. game budgets: Plants vs. Zombies cost $1 million and it's kind of on the low end of what we expect from indie games these days.

A "we just need a programmer to do all the work" open-world anime action RPG project asking for $7k? give me a ****ing break.

You can't excuse Kickstarter with their whole responsibility-dodging FAQ. Kickstarter knows 90% of their projects are impossible and run by unqualified people. Yes, Kickstarter is hugely successful at raising money; the legal system even has a word for this kind of successful enterprise: a scam. Oh but they have a TOS agreement that indemnifies them so it's all ok.

I know it's sort of his life work and all, but do we really know how much time per day he spends on it?

Judging by the games state, about one.
Note: Repeat joke with "notch" as target for instant hilarity.

Supposedly he's not working anywhere else. He might have a lot of hobbies, but $10 an hour isn't a lot to live on.

(Then again, that was a year or so before they actually started one of their own Kickstarter projects)

So what you're saying is that Kickstarter is successful in that people have paid a ton of money to developers?

This thread is moving a bit fast in comparison to the amount of time that I have to respond, so I'm going to keep it short for now (not that there weren't posts that were worthy of more depth).

Jon'C: I basically agree with most of what you said. I think that crowd-funding can potentially be a valuable tool for specific markets (e.g. certain Indie games) & that Kickstarter itself has much room for improvement. My only real argument was that the blame is being placed on things that are beyond the scope of said company (at this time) & I'm really just beating a dead horse at this point & will bow out of what is likely just to result in semantics. I think that we can all agree that there's much room for improvement.


They're successful by the very definition of the word.




[/LIST]
Their aim or purpose is to fund projects. Mission accomplished. We can argue all day long about whether they can be more funder-friendly or whether or not their business model is a viable option for complete funding (as others rightly pointed out isn't often the case). However, if a developer asks for $10k & receives $200k, I don't see how we can say that's not a success, as defined by their aim or purpose.

Maybe one of their improvements could be actually doing some work to justify their 5% cut. Beyond hosting a badly written web app, I mean.

Of course, lol, that assumes they don't have a profit incentive to firehose out as many doomed projects as possible.

Not all games do, but unless we are talking about a fairly simple game, it simply takes a lot of money to make it happen. It's for the same reason that you can't produce a blockbuster summer action move for half a million, and why you can't buy super cars for five thousand a piece. In order to do certain things with current technology, there is a lower limit on the amount of skilled manpower required to make them happen. You can't design a 100 story sky scraper for $500,000 "just because". Big jobs take time, and that time is very expensive because they have to be done by qualified people with marketable skills.



We are talking about what it takes for a Kickstarter project to be considered successful by the people that back it. When I say "from my perspective", one thing you can be quite sure I *don't* mean is "from the perspective of Kickstarter's board of directors about all Kickstarters in general." "My perspective" is that if I put money into something, I want a return on that money that bears some resemblance to what was promised. I could not possibly care less what Kickstarter itself thinks of it, or how chuffed the developers are before they've started working in earnest. Kickstarter has make their lack of responsibility for the final product abundantly clear, and I'm at a total loss for why you think that would be relevant.

I guarantee you that no one who backs a project that doesn't make it to release will consider that project to be anything other than a total failure. You are just are equivocating by redefining the conversation to a tautology that no one was or would ever want to discuss. Since the very beginning we have been discussing whether Kickstarter is a good model for successfully funding the devlopment of games, not whether people will fund it to the goal ammount set by the developers. Being pedantic doesn't change that.



For the big high profile projects, usually it's the first thing mentioned in the video. If you can get support from a publisher, in most cases you'd be insane not to take them up on it.



It's not at all like crowd investing, which is my biggest problem with it. By backing a project you are taking huge risks with your money, and at most you get a slight discount on the game, if it gets released. If the game is successful you don't get benefit from that like you would if you bought stock. You are buying a product sight-unseen, not investing.

Well, it is and it isn't. It's not investing because you don't own anything, and like 99% of the work Kickstarter does screening projects is making sure creators don't call it an investment. Basically Kickstarter is trying to distance themselves from investment as much as they can, because public equity like this is regulated to prevent exactly this kind of scheme.

Note: what Kickstarter is going is probably still illegal in Canada and the US regardless of how they dress it up. Partly because if you asked half of backers they'd call it "investment" even though it isn't, so you know it's sort of an investment scam? But also because it actually is investment, you can't just make unrestricted solicitations to fund a business enterprise like this without reporting it to the securities commission because without restrictions it's automatically a publicly traded firm.

Note also: the SEC has noticed the madness and has crowd funding regulations in the pipeline.

So basically enjoy your backer perks and $7k mmorpg fantasies while they last.


Edit: I checked. It's a grey area in the United States, it is unambiguously illegal in Canada. ror. ty kickstarter for being an accessory and not telling Canadians that it's illegal.

Not sure about games, but I'm happy this got help with funding:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/93832939/makerslide-open-source-linear-bearing-system

Nifty piece of aluminum extrusion.

Initial thought was "another t-slot square tube, big deal". Then I saw how he worked in the V-track. That's pretty slick.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1339254269/ron-paul-road-to-revolution/posts/394273 <- capitalist superman raises $11,000 to make a bideo game, runs out of money after two months and takes almost a year to fess up. shock and awe.

****in poors always begging for the gummet's help. If they weren't so stupid and brown they'd be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps like me.

...

PLEASE GIVE ME MONEY TO MAKE MY RON PAUL VIDEO GAME, I CAN'T DO IT WITHOUT YOUR ON-GOING CHARITY

Another interesting article on the subject at hand.

http://www.giantbomb.com/articles/the-little-fighting-game-that-could/1100-4587/

Jon, how do you suggest that kickstarter more effectively screen projects? What criteria would be used to determine if a project is feasible? How do they determine if the project owners are capable of delivering what they've promised? I share your concerns about kickstarter but I don't believe the TOS is a way to allow a scam to exist. I think it's a necessary consequence because there's no objective way to figure it out. I still don't see how the responsibility lies anywhere but with the person who's putting forth the money to just make an intelligent choice. Do they sue the project owner if they don't deliver? What if they do deliver but it's not up to par? What if something happens outside of their control that makes the project take a dive, are they fiscally responsible? I don't see how any of that can be practically solved other than a simple hands off approach (at least beyond the clearly obvious fraudulent cases).

I'm glad you asked!

Do what the patent office does: require the completion of a comprehensive application and have a professional evaluate the application for completeness. A comprehensive application would include resumes and references for all project creators, a detailed budget including the projected cost of backer rewards and a labour estimate at the prevalent market rate (they could partner with a site like Glassdoor to confirm this data), a realistic risk assessment, and a list of all current or anticipated additional investment (such as volunteer labour). For projects dealing in physical goods (including backer rewards), creators would be required to present quotes from suppliers. Most of this information could be kept confidential until, of course, it is subpoenaed.

A professional project estimator would be able to evaluate each application in about two hours. With overhead, you could charge $200-$250 for the service. Remember, starting a project on Kickstarter isn't automatic: projects are already being screened, but right now instead of screening projects to help backers, they are exclusively screening to protect themselves from liability.

Nothing in the above would deter anybody who is capable of creating and delivering a product to paying customers.

No, really. Have you read their TOS? A full half of the text details a very specific limitation of liability w.r.t. fundraising. That half doesn't even include the standard software limitation of liability.

Their TOS even states (in legalese) that you assume all possible liabilities in relation to any account activity (even those taken by an unauthorized third party). If Kickstarter is sued in connection to you, you are required to assume management of their defense and pay all costs and damages. That's pretty standard for a TOS. However, Kickstarter also reserves the right to assume control of the defense, which basically means they can force you into a multi-million dollar settlement with anybody who sues them.

Yeah, Kickstarter. lol.

Edit: It doesn't seem you quite understood what I am saying here. I'm not saying the TOS gives a loophole that allows scams to exist on their site, I'm saying Kickstarter is the scam.

Well they'd better figure it out damn quick, because the SEC isn't going to wipe their asses for them.

Caveat emptor doesn't apply when the seller is actively concealing defects, which is something being done both by project creators and directly by Kickstarter.

Who is they? Not sure.

Backers: Yes, they do. This is happening now. This is currently your only recourse as a backer.
Kickstarter: No, but they might want to consider it at some point.

Sue.



Creators: Unambiguously yes, they are financially responsible for their failure.

- They almost always operate as an unlimited pass-through, a DBA or something just as bad, so they are assuming full personal responsibility for all business activities. They usually don't know any better because project creators on Kickstarter have no education in business or law almost by definition.
- They solicited general investment (by proxy) and there are laws about the good-faith conduct of the officers of public corporations.
- They agreed to deliver a product at a negotiated price and failed to render the goods and services ('backer rewards', a.k.a. the Kickstarter Store).

Kickstarter: probably, yes, they are.

- Crowdfunding is probably illegal. General solicitation is prohibited, and the line between general solicitation and what kickstarter does is razor thin (and mostly only exists because of their TOS). You can't just ask strangers for money to fund a business.
- They accept money in exchange for products which they do not deliver ('backer rewards', a.k.a. the Kickstarter Store).

Hopefully Kickstarter sees a practical solution, because to be perfectly realistic here, it's not going to take very many more crowdfunding lawsuits before we see legislation that makes Kickstarter partially or fully liable in these cases.

This whole "sue the project leader if the project falls through" attitude is what kickstarter was trying to get away from in the first place, neh?

It irritates me when people treat it like an investment and then get angry if promises fall through. It's supposed to be a donation.. I'm not really seeing what the difference is between the donate button on every indie developer's website (almost all of which say something like "so I can eat and keep making cool games for you", which sounds like funding future promises to me) and kickstarter. Yeah, obviously kickstarter takes a cut but seems fair for the increased visibility.

Yes, it's supposed to be a donation, but it's actually selling a non-existent product at an agreed-upon price. Kickstarters-as-fundraising went out the window a long time ago, now it's a place where you can pre-order the next hit indie game.

Some Kickstarter projects do make me hope they'd succeed, even if I never played/verbed them (like Victory that's going to feature new music by Frank Klepacki).

SF_Gold would have profited through KickStarter, but unfortunately for him, his scheme came years too early. $15 donations would net you early access to a game that will not and could not exist. $20 more and you get a real sample of his wet dreams.

He would have been the kingpin of KickStarter, limited not by a painfully suspicious Paypal account directed to Mexico. And he would have many followers, similar in nature to the few on Massassi that would always come to his defense.

Quite many interesting Kickstarter projects have managed to gather up some nice munnays in the past few weeks

Cyanide and Happiness animated shorts (hooray for black humour!)
The Veronica Mars Movie Project (then again, 3.5 mil for a film isn't exactly enough)
Torment - Tides of Numenera (whoa, a spiritual sequel to Planescape: Torment! kinda)

Eh, the OOTS one still has impressed me the most. $2+ mil for something webcomic-related is quite something.

Speaking of Kickstarter, I got my Pebble watch recently. I like the hardware although it's very much lacking applications. For some reason which I haven't been able to determine, they haven't released the SDK yet. Even now it does have most of the functionality they promised, so I guess this you could call this Kickstarter project a success.

I have this feeling that Apple is studying Pebble closely looking to see what features can added and improved upon for their upcoming Apple watch.

They haven't released the SDK because it's not ready yet. They just posted an update saying the watchface SDK would be out in April though. They've been working with those who paid for early development access to make sure the SDK is solid.

I am very skeptical about it because they are yet to release Wasteland 2 and they're already asking for money for a different game.

Other than apparently not bothering to set up support or an RMA process until after the Pebbles shipped, leaving at least one goon with a DOA Pebble in limbo for weeks until he embarrassed them on Twitter.

Well, they gotta round out the Wasteland 2 budget somehow. Don't worry, the next two Kickstarters will pay for Torment.

They do this all the time in academia. Glad to see the indie game industry is maintaining this tradition of free money with no accountability or oversight.

Ah I didnt hear anything about that, I suspect every new business has similar oversights.

Uh, no. Handling defective product isn't just a nice thing to do, it's a legal requirement and it's a cost that needs to be managed from day 1. Outside of the crowdfunding bubble it is impossible to raise enough money to make a physical product with such a huge gap in your experience or advisors. At best your shareholders would drop a new CEO on you. I mean, you can suspect whatever you want, but I'm telling you this isn't a thing.

And if they had no customer service or RMA process there's a real good chance they weren't doing in-house QA like random sampling. Which means they would have no idea how many defective units they've shipped or how much it will cost to replace them, or even if their supplier contract is being fulfilled.

Ok.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2013/03/17/investment-crowdfunding-is-a-ghetto-stock-market/

neato Forbes article about crowdfrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr-t from an accountant. Talks about the current legal climate and implications.