Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Shinra]

As far as rewards go, Kickstarters need to start thinking of themselves like NPR. When donation time comes around, $150 for a duffle bag and a coffee mug is a rip off, but nobody gives $150 to NPR because they really want a duffle bag and coffee mug.

Can't agree. The most successful Kickstarters have all been laden with bountiful loot, especially with big stretch goals. Maybe that's not what some would consider "appropriate", but it's working and it's becoming the established pattern.

More importantly, Kickstarter is essentially the investment equivalent of micro-finance. And while angel investors are ones who fund things with a higher risk because they like the project or think it's a good cause, they still expect a return - that's why it's called angel investment, rather than charity.

The biggest concerns at this point are people with a poorly managed project that still manages to look good in the Kickstarter, but which won't meet it's goals or even be done. In the worst case, these will be total scams. Kickstarter has already shown it won't police those. In fairness, any policing of Kickstarters is difficult - you can't force a return of money on a true failed investment (nor should you), and it can be difficult to separate the criminal from the merely incompetant. There are some measures that can be taken, but it's not as simple as mirroring real world securities regulation (because these projects are so small).

The problem with a lot of these "successful" kickstarters is that they end up blowing through 3/4s of their kickstarter budget on reward fulfillment, which completely defeats the point of the kickstarter. The rewards aren't things you're purchasing, they're freebies you get for a donation to their project. Maybe, MAYBE it's a preorder for the finished product. But some of these projects have hemorraged money trying to do things like print CDs or custom-paint dice or whatever and ended up losing more money than they took in.

You are not successful with a kickstarter if you leave the site with less money than you entered it with, no matter how much money it generates.

[Shinra]

I thought PA made more than twice its projected funding.

It's probably the largest webcomic around and it made under a million dollars in a month.

Homestuck's kickstarter cleared 1m in 48 hours.

You could argue that Penny-arcade's audience is different and I would most certainly agree, but PA's rewards were all basically "Gabe takes a shit and sends you a digital B&W jpeg of it with his signature scrawled on in MSPaint $5,000"

I think for a kickstarter to be really successful, you need to have good, desirable, reasonable rewards that cost a fraction of their reward tier to produce unless you're just taking a preorder on the product you're creating. Homestuck's got a lot of t-shirt, very cheap bag and pin rewards and sticker rewards, and while the lower tiers are probably all of questionable value to Hussie, the 400-500 dollar tiers are maybe 70 bucks worth of reward and the rest going straight to the kickstarter. When you get overambitious with your reward tiers as many have, you end up costing yourself in the long run.

It's a big criticism of the Ouya kickstarter, as almost all of the tiers of the kickstarter include an Ouya device. The expense of reward fulfillment is going to be tremendous and we've already established they don't have things like production facilities or an actual working model, so the question is - where are they going to get the money to both start production on the device and fulfill all the reward tiers that were offered? It is one of the (many) reasons that we are probably never going to see the Ouya go to production. Honestly, I suspect that Ouya is probably going to be the project that kills Kickstarter.

[Mongrel]

Well, but in some cases fulfillment is incidental.

For instance, there have been a spate of very successful miniatures Kickstarters lately. In those cases, a big chunk of money is going towards the creation of the production tooling and so forth, all of which will be used to make more product afterwards. In the case of a band, the money maybe used to book studio time (and to eat and pay rent) while an album is being created, but once this is done further album sales will net some additional profit and the increased exposure of a new album will hopefully also generate more paying live shows.

It's fully possible to drop almost all your Kickstarter money on fulfillment while coming out ahead in the end. Maybe only "respectably ahead" instead of "spectacularly ahead", but ahead nonetheless.

Be that as it may, the expectation of over-rich rewards is taking hold and there's already been lots of griping about Kickstarters with weak rewards. In the worst case, the phenomenon may cause too many people to over-promise, leading to more failed Kickstarters and possibly even the collapse of confidence in Kickstarter overall.

[Shinra]

Well, but in some cases fulfillment is incidental.

For instance, there have been a spate of very successful miniatures Kickstarters lately. In those cases, a big chunk of money is going towards the creation of the production tooling and so forth, all of which will be used to make more product afterwards. In the case of a band, the money maybe used to book studio time (and to eat and pay rent) while an album is being created, but once this is done further album sales will net some additional profit and the increased exposure of a new album will hopefully also generate more paying live shows.

It's fully possible to drop almost all your Kickstarter money on fulfillment while coming out ahead in the end. Maybe only "respectably ahead" instead of "spectacularly ahead", but ahead nonetheless.

Be that as it may, the expectation of over-rich rewards is taking hold and there's already been lots of griping about Kickstarters with weak rewards. In the worst case, the phenomenon may cause too many people to over-promise, leading to more failed Kickstarters and possibly even the collapse of confidence in Kickstarter overall.

I honestly think this last bit is inevitable and the question is if we are going to see it sooner rather than later. There is already a great deal of drama over a few scattered failed and floundering kickstarter projects. When one of the really big ones - like the aforementioned Ouya or Pebble or something fail to materialize and the kickstarters that are succeeding aren't putting out good rewards, people are just going to stop contributing to the kickstarters and the site will probably fall apart. I'm sure this is also occuring to Kickstarter, which is probably why they made that blog post and the rule change.

[Mongrel]

I suspect that Ouya is probably going to be the project that kills Kickstarter.

I don't expect any one thing to kill Kickstarter, more a growing litany over time of people getting boned. But this is something that's going to come up after the fact, like one too many hangovers the morning after.

Of course it could wind up strengthening Kickstarter by making people more assiduous about vetting their KS investments, but the liklier outcome is people start to think of KS as a home for ripoff artists.

EDIT (@ New Reply): Other than the fall of KS being inevitable, I agree.

[Royal☭]

Well, but in some cases fulfillment is incidental.

For instance, there have been a spate of very successful miniatures Kickstarters lately. In those cases, a big chunk of money is going towards the creation of the production tooling and so forth, all of which will be used to make more product afterwards. In the case of a band, the money maybe used to book studio time (and to eat and pay rent) while an album is being created, but once this is done further album sales will net some additional profit and the increased exposure of a new album will hopefully also generate more paying live shows.

It's fully possible to drop almost all your Kickstarter money on fulfillment while coming out ahead in the end. Maybe only "respectably ahead" instead of "spectacularly ahead", but ahead nonetheless.

Be that as it may, the expectation of over-rich rewards is taking hold and there's already been lots of griping about Kickstarters with weak rewards. In the worst case, the phenomenon may cause too many people to over-promise, leading to more failed Kickstarters and possibly even the collapse of confidence in Kickstarter overall.

The problem is, over-rich rewards as expectation will be what kills kickstarter. Once people start getting a better grasp of what the funding in a kickstarter goes to, nobody is going to sign up if they have a good chance of losing money. As a result, fewer and fewer kickstarters will be made and the whole site might go belly up. I don't mean to suggest that kickstarters shouldn't offer rewards, or even offer their product as one of the rewards, but trying to price something you haven't even made is a sucker's game.

[Brentai]

If KS was smart it'd accept the inevitability of some of its currently overblazing star burning out, and control the process of ratcheting down back to a normal level of popularity, rather than desperately hang onto its current "everyone can earn a million dollars with Kickstarter!" rep and then explode into a million pieces when not everybody earns a million dollars.

[Thad]

Well, I think that's exactly what it's doing.  These changes are going to hurt its business in the short term but, I think, save it in the long term.  And that kind of long-term strategy shows a kind of business acumen I rarely see in companies of any sort, let alone Internet startups.

[Brentai]

Or a company about internet startups.

Kickstarter's advantage is that they have a rather huge library of mistakes to learn from.

[TA]

Everybody pledge this right now.

[Ted Belmont]

Everybody dance now.

C&C MUSIC FACTORY - EVERYBODY DANCE NOW

[NexAdruin]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1227949612/tremulus-a-storytelling-game-of-lovecraftian-horro

last chance to get them to their $60k stretch goal.

[Zach]

I don't have as many dollars as I like, but I have some Kickstarters I want to mention.

First, there's Dungeonlands: Wrath of the Lich Queen. It's a Savage Worlds/Pathfinder adventure/campaign/maps set being put out by Talisman Studios. I've done some work for them, but I'm not attached to this Kickstarter in any way. I'm curious what John Wick would put in a dungeon intended for demigods.

Second, there's Shadow of the Red Moon. The original was a standalone graphic novel about telepathic housepets and the apocalypse. This is the sequel. The artist has a talent for animal faces and getting to the root of the human-pet bond.

Finally, Kick-Heart! Masaaki Yuasa, director of Tatami Galaxy and Kaiba wants to make a short. I trust him.

[Thad]

The Goon movie

Help us make a NEW KIND of animated film... one that's LOUD, VIOLENT and OFFENSIVE TO YOUR GRANDMA.

Your donations will directly FUND "The Goon" movie STORY REEL. (including vocal performances by Oscar® Nominee Paul Giamatti as "Franky" and Clancy Brown as "The Goon")

...holy hell.  I think those are exactly the voices I already hear in my head when I read the comic.

[Royal☭]

Maybe now they can follow up this:

The Goon - Teaser Trailer

Early Goon Film Test

[Royal☭]

Amid Amidi describes the troublesome nature if the Goon kickstarter

Basically comes down to this Kickstarter is not for a movie, but for a story reel which can be shopped around to major studios, with no guarantee it will be made. Backers are essentially being asked to shave off production costs for something they'll never see.

[Büge]

Well, that and there's not really much transparency as to where the money's going. What I'd like to know is: why do they need Paul Giamatti and Clancy Brown at this point?

[Mongrel]

Marketing.

There are a lot of problematic things about suspect Kickstarters, but I actually think Eric Powell is being pretty damn honest here. $400,000 does not make you a modern full-feature animated movie (Pixar's budget is generally well over $100 Million per movie). Not even close and not the kind of money you can raise on Kickstarter.

What he's really looking for here is two things: Seed capital to keep going and concrete interest to convince studios to fund the movie. Maybe not all of the $400,000 will be used for the Demo Reel, But it's easier to explain a Kickstarter in terms of a concrete definite goal (look, we made a thing!), then "Hey we're going to going to make a demo reel, plus we also need cash to buy hookers and blow for a rack of Hollywood producers".

[Büge]

(look, we made a thing!)

But how would we know that? We're never going to know if the story reel is worth 400K because we're never going to see it.

[Mongrel]

If you look at the Kickstarter, the top donation bracket is a 12-person slot to screen the actual reel.

So it's fair to say that very FEW people will see it, but that's quite different from NOBODY getting to see it. Now if you want to criticize it on the grounds of "well this is what people are paying for, so they should get to see it", then sure. Maybe there's a reason they can't share it more widely, but if that's the case, they should at least explain why on the Kickstarter.

EDIT:

There are probably already a lot of scams on Kickstarter and that problem's only going to balloon, but if Amidi wants to play Inspector Detector, then he ought to at least go after the ones that really do smell like fraud. I think the intention here really is what it says on the tin, to use this money to try and get a Goon Movie made, with no promise that a theatre-ready project actually will be made. That to me is honesty, not deceit.