I think we have our first kick starter Failure

Remembering the discussion on the E-3 episode of the bombcast with Braid Muir the idea that kickstarter had to have its first failure (large sum of money backed/no product delivered). I think this might be it...Kickstarter tabletop game collapses after bringing in $123K. Anyway I though I was wondering what the community felt about this.

There's another thread about this somewhere on here. That new Spike Lee joint seems cool.

It's just another warning that Kickstarter isn't an online store and that people shouldn't treat it as such. Just because you put down a lot of money for something doesn't mean you're guaranteed to see it on time or at all.

This isnt going to be good.....

This is just one of many things wrong with Kickstarter. The complete lack of any accountability makes the entire process incredibly shady, the fact that people with millions of dollars are using it to generate millions of dollars to make a movie is incredibly shady, and the fact that people can put up a posting for others to donate 150 dollars so they can buy a game (and it goes through mind you) is fucking retarded.

I've abandoned ship on Kickstarter a long time ago. It's a nice idea that can be used to make indie projects, unfortunately the people that need it most aren't the ones profiting off of it anymore.

And this is why we don't use Kickstarter

Well at least that guy seems to be very forthcoming about what went wrong and about returning the money to backers. Although since he quit his day job to make the game I don't see him returning $123,000 anytime soon on a single wage.

Quick, let's shit on Kickstarter and feel smug because confirmation bias!

Kickstarter is for helping something get made, and sometimes that help isn't enough, either because of insufficient funds or company misdirection. It's not a store, if you always expect a perfectly working product and not a project to kickstart (see a trend?) something you support, it's not your place.

Kickstarter is no difference from angel investors giving money to a start up. Everyone knows up front that there is no guarantee the project will ever see the light of day. This doesn't in any way invalided the crowdfunding model.

Hopefully people will have a bit more realistic of a look at Kickstarters now. Devs will need to get better at projecting their costs (and understanding that costs will be more than you initially budget) and backers will need to realize that it isn't a guarantee.

I do really like the Kickstarter model though. It really did need this though (as sad as it is).

I was thinking more in the ways of Project Eternity and Torment with one doing extremely well and being a solid game, and the other being total garbage and maybe not even shipping. 100k isn't that much money when making a game and it's not a big enough fail.

Indeed. It's not a pre-order service or an investment. We need failures so that people realize that it's not a store. You're donating money so that a thing that wouldn't be made potentially gets made.

I mean, you can treat it as if donating money to a cause. Maybe Amnesty International is a reputable organisation for donations and they won't like, go gamble the money away... whereas if you meet some random person on the street that says he's gonna save the world but doesn't have a clue as to how he will do that, and asks you to donate to his cause, then maybe that's not such a good idea.

For the same reason as I'd rather donate to a company or individuals like say Double Fine because I think they can deliver on the things they claim they will deliver on, and if they're not established they just need to show some stuff. Have a prototype, or at least explain how you'll make this thing happen in great detail.

Convince me. Why should I give you my money.

Like, I'm not going to back a project because some guy writes one paragraph about how he's gonna make the best RPG ever. Heck, I didn't even trust Lord British when he popped up out of nowhere and was like "hey mangs Imma make a new Ultima game it's gonna be the best game ever!" and I was like nah when I saw what he had made up until that point. Now, later down the line, I see there's been a whole lot of work put into it and it's looking pretty cool already so I'm ready to trust him more.

Quick, let's ignore the shortcomings of Kickstarter and post sarcastic comments about people hating on it so we can feel smug conformation bias!

pls stop

Kickstarter is a great way for developers to make games that don't appeal to big publishers. No was going to pay a developer to make a turn based shadowrun game and that turned out pretty cool. Same goes for the new Jagged Alliance game and Wasteland. Those games just wouldn't be made without kickstarter because they are not a super safe bet. You just have to know that once you pledge your money, it's gone and you have no guarantees. I thinks that it's worth the rsik if it means that some of my favourite games get a chance to come back.

NOT SICK OF HEARING ABOUT THIS

PLS MORE THREADS ABOUT HOW I SHOULD BE WARY OF KICKSTARTER

Failure can take the weirdest shapes:

http://qz.com/94925/this-man-lost-his-house-because-his-kickstarter-was-too-successful/

@manmadegod: Not the same at all. Angel investors stand to make a profit. Kickstarting isn't an investment.

This is why I've only invested in DoubleFine's rpg Adventure Game, and even they're having financial troubles with the game. You gotta think about the situation before throwing money down, a kickstarter project is not guaranteed to be completed and even if it is, it might turn out to be total crap.

Only kickstarter I ever backed was Planetary Anihilaton and I only did that because I knew the guys at Uber had experience with previous games, had a relatively small team that was easy to pay and the amount donated was enough to make a game that didn't require voice actors and marketing campaigns because in the end the people in the studio might even work for a month or two without salary in case the money runs out too soon or at least accept a reduced salary.

Doublefine RPG?

*Adventure game - rather.

The problem are the donators' expectations and not the entire concept of crowdfunding. The main issue I have with Kickstarter and other services like it are that the project pages prominently display the product that is being done and not the people who are creating it. Yes, most Kickstarter projects have a video where the creators speak about themselves a bit or there will be a couple of paragraphs talking about their experiences and how it relates to what they are trying to make. There's also that little box on the sidebar with their social media information. Nevertheless, the way that the project pages are set up implies that there is a certain level of guarantee that this product will be given to those who donate. The only thing that can be guaranteed though is that the person you are donating to will try to create whatever it is they are pitching. Even that promise is a bit flimsy; I don't know much about Kickstarter's policy on what their legal course of action would be if a person just blatantly took the donation money and ran with it.

I don't know if this would rectify the problem with donator expectations, but what I would like to see is a format change where the first thing you see when looking at a Kickstarter page are the creators' resume and/or a company's portfolio of work. This would give a better indication of both the chances of the product actually coming out and its quality.

Kickstarter isn't buying a game, its investing in the creation of a game. If you aren't fully prepared to end up with a bad game, or even no game at all, then you shouldn't be using Kickstarter.

and, just like investing money anywhere else, you need to research what it is you are backing, and make smart choices. When I look at my backer history:

FTL and Shadow Run are great, Castle Story, There Came an Echo, Grim Dawn, Sound Self, Dog Sled Story, and Defense Grid 2 are all coming along well, and even both of the Double Fine games look OK.

yeah what people need to understand is that KS is not a fucking pre order supermarket.... you put money in there you better understand you may never see anything for it.

People that treat kickstarter projects as pre orders are complete and utter idiots.

I still think KS is an awesome thing, without it we would probably never get stuff like FTL, chivalry, ring runner... but people need to fucking understand that you're not buying a copy of the game, you're putting money down to help the dev TRY and accomplish the project, and they trow a possibility of getting a copy of said game IF they can finish it just as a thank you.

Phew, I thought Massive Chalice had already gone tits up!

That's pretty rough, but them's the breaks.

I've pledged to a pretty broad range of Kickstarters, but I'm still pretty choosy about what I give to. There are a lot of projects that sound neat but I just can't get behind because they sound too ambitious or pie-in-the-sky. There are others that are borderline, and I'll sometimes pledge to those at a lower tier, knowing that there's a good chance they'll fail or come out and be garbage. Then there are a rare few that I'll pledge a large amount for, because they fit into a niche I really like and they seem to know what they're doing. I still know those might turn out bad, but I'm happy to help some people work on a passion project if it's something I'm also passionate about.

A fair number of the projects I've pledged to are actually comics or books of illustration. So far, those have all turned out pretty great. I'm sure it's a lot easier for those projects to estimate costs, though, and it's usually pretty easy to find an artist's portfolio or past works to judge their competence.

i paid for one of these fucking things http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1703567677/icontrolpad-2-the-open-source-controller/comments

and rumors have it that the asshole decided to use some of that money for another secret project, and now the damm thing is in development limbo.

I have a feeling the majority of people complaining about stuff like this haven't backed anything on kickstarter. People backing stuff know what they're getting into.

They did another update which clarified a bunch of the questions people had. While this is obviously a failure, it sounds like they're making every effort they can to get people their money back. I think the kind of disastrous failure Ryan had in mind is probably a half a million dollar project with no return in investment.

Lol that would suck!

I dont think anyone's getting there money back anytime soon, and i doubt all of them will, wheres a guy with no job coming up with that kind of dough? Unless the courts step in and make him liquidate everything he owns hes not paying it all back.

I don't know how he will come up with it, or if he will, but he is trying. We don't know enough about the company itself, or how much of the initial investment has already been spent to speculate about whether or not he will be able to pay it back.

This is old news. Wasn't there already a thread about this?

There are, at this point, several decent games that have come out of Kickstarter that we assume would not have been made otherwise. It is too late for the Kickstarter model to prove an unmitigated disaster, but that does not necessarily make the individual stories less interesting. On the contrary I think that each one I've read has its own twists and turns and insights into the business of making games - well, except this one, where the only info we have is that some publisher takes full responsibility for the failure and gives only the vaguest of reasons why.

A minor difference. In fact, a LARGE percentage of angel investors never see their money again and when they do it's never a big return; they don't take large chunks of the company like Venture firms do. Both Angels and KickStarter backers are looking to help get an idea off the ground because they want to use it one day.

This particular case just seems like a long chain of misfortunes. It never hurts to ask yourself if what you are backing seems credible. I'll buy that Brian Fargo is probably capable of getting people to make a game for the amount of money donated (and Kickstarter is about donations, not investments), but it also didn't surprise me when Tim Schafer announced that he had over-designed Broken Age and needed more time and money to finish it (thus the game being split in half).

That being said, I feel like this doesn't constitute a "big" kickstarter failure, because there have been several other projects that have similarly crashed and burned. At some point something really big (>1 Mil.) is going to fail, some people will inevitably not get their money back and it's going to poison the well for everyone who wants to crowdfund things

'Minor difference'? I think there's a pretty significant difference between standing to make a profit on your business investment and not standing to make a profit on your not-a-business-investment, but ok, people can decide that for themselves.

And no, angel investment is rarely altruistic enough to be given just because they want to use x one day. They may have more of a personal involvement than more traditional sources of funding, but it is still usually a business investment (albeit a high risk one) - that's why it says 'investment' right there in it. It quite often has high potential rewards, to counter the higher level of risk.

Kickstarting is much closer to group commissioning / patronage of the arts than a business investment. It's a pretty sweet deal for the creators, because they manage to hold on to all of the potential financial reward while off-loading most or all of the risk on to the Kickstarters, with no legal obligation to ever deliver anything. It still has its place, but people shouldn't for a minute believe that they are investing in these businesses in any form. They're helping to commission a piece of work, that's it.