By virtue of the circle(s) of friends I have on Facebook, the only kickstarters I’ve heard about are for video games. So, the reward would be in-game stuff like a special mount or signature spell or something, and the long-term reward would be getting to play a game that otherwise would have never been written.
I think most people first encounter Kickstarter via some other site that’s running a Kickstarter campaign for its own project. For example, I imagine a lot of people first heard about Kickstarter when Rich Burlew set up his Kickstarter campaign and posted about it on the Order of the Stick website.
I’ve never had a project not get delivered at all. As for lateness, I figure you have to expect a long wait. The basic model is you’re sending somebody the money to get started on a project - you can’t expect delivery of the final product six weeks later. I don’t think kickstarter projects are any slower than other equivalent projects, but customers notice the long development time more with kickstarter because they were aware of the project from its beginning rather than first hearing about it at a later stage of the process.
since we exist in reality, obviously things can go wrong. anyone who doesn’t take this into account is delusional.
I learned about the OOTS Kickstarter at the OOTS website, and about the Obsidian game Kickstarter on a scifi/fantasy/gaming forum I frequent. Kickstarter itself is its own website though.
I have gone to the Kickstarter website and found it fascinating. I also have an idea that i may present to the website.
Let’s say it is approved. Would i be permitted to solicit the Straight Dope members?
Also, i have a question about how kickstarter makes momey theselves. Do they get a cut of approved project funding?
My little group of friends have considered going through Kickstarter, or actually an international equivalent like Indiegogo, for our short film projects. I’m part way through finishing my first short film and showcasing that will hopefully prove our skills and excite people enough to crowdfund a more elaborate sequel (or an unrelated but similar film project) allowing us to pay everyone on the cast and crew, and have fancier costumes and sets, etc.
Or then again, maybe it won’t. They’re becoming so glutted with projects that it’s harder to get noticed, especially amongst so many worthy ideas.
That’s a Straight Dope policy question, not a Kickstarter one. My guess is that you’d be able to do it in the Marketplace subforum for certain, but would have to ask staff permission to do so anywhere else.
<checks> I see that they get 5% of the funding.
And Amazon Payments, who do the payment processing, get another 3-5%. They also estimate that up to 5% of pledged payments will be rejected (credit card problems, generally).
Kickstarter is really about the art patronage angle, as has been mentioned. The fact that it now seems to be a pre-order shop is almost an accident.
Tim Schafer (who designed such things as Day of the Tentacle and Psychonauts) wanted to produce a new adventure game, but since those aren’t considered marketable anymore he couldn’t find a publisher. So, he went to Kickstarter and wound up with over $3 million.
This seemed to open the floodgates to a lot of games and gaming related projects. The top-funded projects on Kickstarter right now are mostly along those lines, led by the Ouya, an open-source gaming console that cleared $8 million.
The highest funded Kickstarter is the non-gaming (but still hardware) Pebble Watch.
So while it started as a method for arts patronage, it’s turning into a pre-order shop. Kickstarter is trying to distance itself from that and has released several statements saying “We are not a store!” but that’s what most people seem to be treating it as these days.
There have been a couple of failures so far but I think the day is coming when one of the really big Kickstarters will fail and a lot of people will be upset but there won’t be much they can do about it.
I recently contributed to a Kickstarter. I was basically pre-ordering a product.
Normally a business acquires start-up capital through investment loans. Then they make their product, and then they see if it will sell. In this model, I pre-order my product, and the cash gets used to fund the start-up and production costs. The downside is that if anything goes wrong my investment might be wasted. The upside is that if I didn’t “contribute” then the product would never get made at all.
I put “contribute” in quotation marks because I think of it as a transaction rather than a donation.
I’ve seen a few instances where some guy has a clever idea for a widget and thinks that if he raises $15,000 he can produce a few hundred a year in his basement or whatever. Then the kickstart goes viral and he finds himself with $300k in capital and 10,000 pre-orders, with no actual plan on how to produce such a quantity. Now he’s got to stop everything and start working with manufacturing firms to simplify his design for mass production in China or something. Projected ship dates go all to hell.
Law of unintended consequences and all that.
Wired magazine loves them some Kickstarter. Here’s some articles.
FWIW I’ve gotten burned on a Kickstarter before. I pledged some money to get a Harvey Pekar statue put up in a Cleveland library and was supposed to get a record from his collection in exchange. Never happened. But the statue did happen so I did get mostly what I wanted to get.
Yes they do! The article I mentioned in the OP was one I read on Wired.
I think the ultimate Wired article would be about a Kickstarter to fund development of an autonomous drone whose design was crowdsourced and was manufactured with a 3-D printer. And you’d be able to control the drone with an iPhone or something 
Just thought I would leave this here. When Kickstarters go bad.
The backer sets their own deadline, so we’re not discussing speed but rather delay. Of course delays and over-runs happen during construction and software projects as well.
I agree - and I’m a Kickstarter fan. But this is something which is new, so I recommend people think hard about it before sending cash. Thinking hard is good for you! If you conceive of this as an advance purchase, don’t be surprised if there’s a 3, 6, 12 or indefinite month delay.
I’d be very wary of an crowd-funding as an investment -which again Kickstarter does not do-, otherwise known as crowd-muppeting. I expect that a few will lose their shirts and many will invest without applying due diligence.
References to SDMB threads:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=15753003
Does the site make any effort to try to weed out potential scams?
Does it make any effort to manage the types of projects in any way? I saw a project that was a film on a topic that would be very appealing to what I imagine are Kickstarter-types. I can imagine topics that are very un-appealing to most but would be very appealing to some people.
I have given to various projects on Kickstarter for exactly those reasons. And quite a few others.
The Capture Camera Clip System was teh first project I backed. It was almost exactly what you describe in your last paragraph. He asked for $10,000 and got over $360,000. Kickstarter didn’t have a requirement for delivery dates then, although he had set some for himself, which he missed because of the work needed to scale things up. But it was a success (And a good product for photographers, I really like it.) And he just finished his second Kickstarter, Leash and Cuff. Which ended on the 14th, and I received mine in the mail yesterday. Knowing he was going to get the funding, he was able to start production early and get out the rewards immediately. (Another nice item BTW. Can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.)
Kickstarter had 13 categories (and even more sub-categories) for projects. I have backed something in 12 of them (Haven’t found any fashion projects I really liked.) and spent way too much money of the last year. 21 of the rewards are past due, almost all for good reasons like HD crashes or illness. Several are because of the very success of the project being more than they had planned on. OTOH, I have received 42 rewards, from a simple thanks to some t-shirts, to several graphic novels.
Very important to remember. I have no doubt I will get stiffed completely eventually. Not for too much, since I am careful about who I give large amounts too. But it will happen.
I heard about the OOTS here, but most of the projects I have found have been through Twitter. I have been hearing about a lot of game projects since I started listening to a gaming news podcast, which has resulted in and increase in my backing of games on the site.
They do try to weed out scams. And they have some fairly stringent rules about what can and can’t be put on the site.