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When Kickstarter Projects Go Missing
On Friday, we posted about Kickstarter's new rules of engagement, including some new rules under which some of the most popular Kickstarter projects to date might never have surfaced. But what about ones that make it to the site, then disappear? Wired takes a look at what happens to those Kickstarter projects that for one reason or another get yanked from the site. (DMCA complaints apparently are often that one reason.)
I'm actually more concerned about projects that never get _delivered._ Kickstarter puts some distance between themselves and "investors" based on just being a facilitator, but I'd be curious about the ratio of projects that never see light of day or--as I suspect is even more frequent--see it so late that the original Kickstarter pledge should be considered broken.
This specific example is interesting to me:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/airshipambassador/wollstonecraft
because I know the *author*, and believe that its persistent delays are symptomatic of his personality. I doubt it will ever see light of day, and the 90,000 dollars handed over has already been largely spent.
There's not much difference between this and showing a "simulation of a product" and yet one is banned while the other remains acceptable.
An obvious step would be to hold funds in escrow but that would seriously impact Kickstarter's minimalist business model and increase costs of funding...which might be a good thing.
It's like investing, but without the prospect of cash return, it's more 'investing in future entertainment' than future financial rewards. You may get goods (most of which will have more sentimental value than actual value). It's 'better' in some sense, because you know you're losing the money you give - there's no risk, you're just out the money - but it allows you to support a product that might not otherwise get made, and no one should give more than they can afford to lose, because they will definitely lose everything they give.
Also, it stabs at a lot of pricing models. I'm a games guy so I think in terms of games. If I look at games I've played the most those happen to be the paradox strategy games and the X series (I'm not linking because I'm not pitching them just take this as a statement of fact, as I am an expert in the games I have played the most), now those games have given me personally quite a lot more value than other comparably priced titles. I would have been quite happy with those products at double the price, and if I can be reasonably sure of another one in the series by offering to pay more then I'm 'investing' in my future entertainment, not my pension plan, but future entertainment.
It has the side benefit of being able to extract astronomical amounts of money (10 grand for a game) from people who have astronomical amounts of money and nothing to do with it. That money won't trickle down on it's own in some supply side voodoo, you need to create a product (fly out to meet the developers, get a statue of yourself in the game!) to sell at an extremely high margin. The rich guy gets some novelty and ego padding out of it, and the rest of us might get a game.