Damn dude, those aren’t hurdles, those are skyscrapers! A new thing that nobody has ever done before? A groundbreaking success in funding? I don’t see how anything would ever get kickstarted by those standards.
I just meant something at the level of those Ossic headphones. High-end head-tracking headphones?
I think Oculus Rift is the only product which meets the criteria I outlined.
I can’t really speak to either of those projects since I didn’t back them and haven’t researched them. I would imagine higher end items have their own additional set of risks, in that you’re narrowing your possible customer base by level of interest plus price.
I’m more interested in smaller projects, stuff that might be more difficult to get financial backing for because the return may not look that great. May not be the most innovative thing you’ll ever see, but might be different enough that publishers may not want to roll the dice. That’s the kind of thing I’m down with supporting and that I can see keeping Kickstarter going as a viable option.
Oculus rift, for one
The Pebble smart watch before smart watches were a thing. And they certainly hadn’t been done at that price point.
Also, I don’t know whether it counts at wildly successful, but I got The Present from Kickstarter. A brand new annual clock that’s also kind of an art piece. Mine has been going for over 5 years and it’s a genuinely different way to take a look at time passing. Doesn’t fulfill any real need as such. But it was pretty successful (only achieved about 4 times the campaign goal) and innovative. Though on a much smaller scale than Pebble.
+1 This is exactly how I look at it. I’ve supported lots of games, but never with more money than I would be willing to lose gambling at the track.
I find it tough to wrap my mind around the venom towards Kickstarter, given that no one is required to support anything. I mean, it’s not like a tax. Maybe a newbie to Kickstarter who initially did not understand the very significant possibility that nothing worthwhile would be produced. But people who keep getting angrier and angrier as they repeatedly support projects with the idea that this is like a purchase of a guaranteed product?
I think people are just disposed to be drama llamas online over, well, basically anything. I mean, don’t get me wrong, when I back a project I expect a good faith effort to deliver and I’m not wild when I don’t end up getting what I was promised (actually in some ways more so if the thing actually comes out but they made some crucial change to what I was pitched). But you read comments sections on Kickstarter if there’s the least complication and people just get so aggro. Not for me.
I think the internet is just a rage multiplier. And everyone’s going for the perfect combo.
Hey whoa, that’s deep.
I kinda wonder if you and Laminator are speaking to different varieties of Kickstarter. His seems mostly geared toward crazy Inventions (gadgets, devices, tools, etc.), whereas you seem to be primarily talking about entertainment products (e.g., boardgames and videogames).
I think that there is a bit of a gulf between the two, and that the criteria he outline are much more “dangerous” in the inventions side of Kickstarter. Building a brand new, market-creating, need-fulfilling, problem-solving gadget that no one has ever made before is a little different than making your own particular take on a Euro-style worker placement boardgame, but this time with Orcish weapons factory management as the principle theme. While neither are guaranteed successes or even necessarily easy, thinking up, designing, prototyping, testing, refining, reengineering, and mass-producing a gadget-style invention is, I think, a much harder task to attempt.
So in that vein, if Joe McRegularguy says he’s thought up a perpetual motion machine that will power your smartwatch forever and ever and he only needs $10,000,000 to build it, I’ll be way more skeptical of him than Sally von Averagegal wanting to make her STEM Pioneers card battler game a reality for $30,000.
Yes, that’s become clearer to me as the discussion has moved along. I only chimes in because I found @LMN8R’s point about only backing established creators and avoiding those trying to create new stuff to be completely at odds with my own approach. If that was intended mainly for backing higher end devices, that wasn’t clear to me initially.
For what it’s worth, the one non-established creator I did back on KS completely failed to deliver his product for years and years but still sends us really sad emails every couple of months about how he’s working on it for sure. I’m just like, dude, I appreciate your constant self-flagellation for my wasted $15, but you made like $4.5k from this after fees and taxes. You can probably let go 5 years on. . .
Then let me swerve back to my original point, which is that Kickstarter is good, and serves a valuable purpose for those who know what they’re doing. I recognize that may not be the case for every market or consumer item but for I’ve had pretty a pretty darn good run with successful outcomes by stuff I’ve backed, quite likely through dumb luck. I’m not analyzing that one too closely.
Yeah, to be clear, that was more just sad anecdata rather than an attack against the platform’s enormous benefits.
Esp. since I might try to tap into those in a year or two for an RPG project i’m working on :)
No, I don’t intend my experience to be a counterpoint to your, or anyone else’s experience. If things had gone badly for projects I had backed I’d probably be a lot more down on Kickstarter in general.
I actually like Kickstarter as an idea, there’s a spot it fills well. It’s like those micro-lending companies that were big a decade ago, sometimes you just need to go directly to your audience and work out a direct arrangement. Or to put it another way, I think the world would be a little less interesting without Kickstarter in it.
Maybe it’s just that I’ve backed around 300 projects and less than 5% have failed to deliver, but I feel like it’s pretty possible to get a sense of whether a project is a good back or not.
To clarify my position - I’m not really talking about the types of projects you back @divedivedive. Smaller and less risky projects make a lot more sense to back even if they’re from unknown dfevelopers as long as you always acknowledge the possibility of losing the money you donated.
I was just extrapolating off of the headphones which just failed - a much more expensive, a much more technical, and super risky endeavor promising something that no one else has done before.
Wow, poor guy. That’s worse than a few dollars wasted. No matter what they say about starting a business being the bees’ knees, it can be tough on the soul. All those people that feel entitled to something, the fact that you’re also letting your baby down and all that psychological bullshit about never giving up… yuck.
What was worst for RJ, I think, was the announcement of Starfinder, which more or less did exactly what he was trying to do, but with the full force and financial backing of the Paizo empire, creating an “official” ruleset for scifi play that his little “Pathfinder compatible” product would never be able to stand up against.
Mind, he was already majorly behind schedule by the time that happened, but it basically sucked all the air out of the room and left him gasping. The project never really recovered from that.
AKA, as another possibility for @LMN8R’s rhetorical “why hasn’t anyone ever done this perfect and obvious solution to technical problem X?” question, perhaps one of the majors in the field is getting ready to do exactly that three minutes after your KS launches :(
I’m willing to take the bad beats. I wouldn’t back stuff at the levels I do if I wasn’t. I’m not whining, I’m not mad. Some projects simply don’t work out and there is clear evidence in advance that creators are making a good faith effort to do all they can.
That’s not what happened with Ossic. They burned $3m plus while posting positive updates along the way. They didn’t budget for production and those dollars all went to the top end of the project. They ate fat for years then said “sorry, not sorry. Fuck off”
I’ve backed maybe a dozen things if that. Probably less.
The only one I can remember now is 7 Continents. I have a pristine copy in England. Might sell it.