Kickstarter Concerns - Feature Creep Episode 4 By Tarmack
7Kickstarter is a fantastic idea. Put the funding of a project in the hands of the consumers. Indie projects, snazzy consumer goods and all manner of product ideas exist on the kickstarter page. Crowd sourced funding has proven to be a very successful venture if you are either already famous or have someone with a big enough platform get wind of your idea. It is effectively acting as a base level stock market where instead of monetary return on investment, your return comes in the form of tier rewards. A hands off approach where the ability for a creator to actually complete the project is never questioned. Essentially there is no accountability and in the catagory of games while we've seen some great kickstarter ideas and incredible funding levels achieved, none of those projects are close to market. It remains to be seen if they will finish at all. Much like the stock market, ye takes yer chances. The next step moving in a direction to make this a safe and secure method of funding projects is exactly what happened in the stock market, there are more than one. Hopefully we see the first few successes where people who funded projects start to get their tier rewards instead of failures where the company admits it just isn't happening. I'm also curious to see if big business gets the crowd source bug. After all, EA sells makes indie games now. I wonder who will be the first to try it. Certainly one hell of a preorder, to buy the game before it's been started. You watch. Coming 2 years from now, vote with your wallet and pick your pre-order tier. Do you want Mass Effect 4: Shepard goes to Disney Land with a collectors edition poster signed by the spouses of the developers? Or Battlefield 4: Pink Unicorns edition with only half the DRM of retail? Invest now, before we've done any work. Maybe that's unduly harsh on EA. How about Call of Duty: Your Mom edition where all of the NPCs are voiced by Xbox live players?