| noname2200 said: Two reasons, mostly. The second reason is explained in some detail above. But this post hints towards the first reason. Simply put, when you fund a kickstarter game you are an investor, not a consumer. You are putting money down towards a product that does not, and conceivably may not ever, exist. In exchange, you get the (likely) possibility of acquiring a license to use one copy of the title some time down the road, when the game is completed. In other words, even though you are an investor, you get the same reward the consumer does, with maybe a few dollars shaved off for your troubles. You do not, however, get to enjoy any of the things that nearly every other investor does: you have a 0% ownership stake in the product, and you get zero say in how the product is produced, published, marketed, distributed, etc. I hesitate to say that you've given the developer a "gift," because that's not completely accurate, but you certainly aren't going to get treated like the investor you are. That does not sit well with me; not to sound hyperbolic, but it feels like desperate consumers are being exploited by a system that seems so fundamentally broken that the only way consumers can get titles they want is to cede ownership of their investment to someone else. |
As long as people want to see some things they like being made, and expecting nothing but a good product delivered, I'd say there will be more than enough interest in this sort of crowdfunding.
For those who do look for more than that, other than pure satisfaction of playing actual game they funded, there's solutions like Gambitous that are aimed at more business oriented folks.
I personally just want to see some of great dev names of this industry (namely ex Interplay folks and people like Tim Schafer and Ragnar Tornquist) revisiting old genres that became niche and are not lucrative enough for mainstream publishers, and give us more of their magic they are so good in making.
