I don't agree with David Brothers on the PA Kickstarter page, and I think the hate is unwarranted. I think both Gabe and Tycho are both turds, but that they still occasionally produce something genuine, such as their intent with this Kickstarter.
Many people are complaining that they're trying to get $1,000,000 to remove ALL ADs and accusing this of being a scam. Consider, though, what that money goes to pay: 14 employees. Even if they only pay those employees $30,000 a year, that's $420,000 just for those salaries. That's almost half a million to pay people who are NOT Gabe and Tycho. And then one considers the operating costs of running servers that have to be getting several million hits a month, plus a webshow, plus a podcast, plus financing for games and other operations in addition to running two conventions a year. I think they also mentioned that they'd take less of those "Comics for other people" projects that get in the way. I don't think these guys are trolling for easy money.
And I don't think they violate Kickstarter's ideas. They're asking for money to produce NEW content for the next year. Last year, Richard Stevens used Kickstarter
to fund his putting a bunch of old Diesel Sweeties books into eBook format. Nothing physical produced, only repackaging old content, but nobody in the comics community raised a shit fit over him abusing Kickstarter. Plus, there are clearly ramifications for other webcomics creators who are much smaller being able to adjust the model on a smaller scale without having to beg me and everyone else constantly to buy their shit that they may not really want. Let the haters hate, but the biggest problem people seem to have with it is the sheer SCALE of the project.
And yeah, I'm probably one of the last people on Earth to defend PA, but I actually don't have beef with this project, don't think that it "steals money from other Kickstarters", and I don't think that they should be shamed for it just because they're already a juggernaut.
