The Dangers of Beating Your Kickstarter Goal

jfruh writes "In March of 2012 legendary game designers Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert ran a Kickstarter to design a new adventure game, asked for $400,000, and came away with more than $3.3 million. Their promised delivery date was October 2012. Now it's July 2013, and the project still needs cash, which they plan to raise by selling an 'early release' version on Steam in January 2014. One possible lesson: radically overshooting your crowdfunding goal can cause you to wildly expand your ambitions, leading to a project that can't be tamed."

Comments

Re:Nothing to do with goals

[nitehawk214]

My theory is that Tim realized that people will give him money for making stupid videos and promises (that at least are backed up by his reputation as a great game maker, unlike a lot of other KS campaigns), and therefore he almost has to try to see how much money he can get before making the game. It is a giant snowball effect. The more money he gets, the bigger and better game he can promise, which means he needs more money, so more video shenanigans and dancing around trying to get people to give him yet more money.

My prediction is that when the game is finally released the early backers and fans will hail it as the greatest game ever that changed the face of the gaming world... no matter what the game is actually like.

I am fully prepared to be flamed and modded down by doublefine backers.