Sony launches crowdfunding platform

[Normchacho]

osed125 said:

Normchacho said:

osed125 said:

Normchacho said:

bunchanumbers said:

Normchacho said:

 

The problem is the product does reach its goal but it gets delayed or outright cancelled. 

When you pre-order a game, you don't put money on the table until the game is in your hands; on crowd funded games, you put the money but you don't know if the game will reach your hands.

Which may happen if you fund a game on kickstarter being made by a group of five guys in a basement. But this is a multi-billion dollar company running a program all on it's own. The terms are very simple. You back a product you are interested in, if that product reaches it's goal of X amount of dollars, that product gets made and the people who backed it get the product. If it fails to reach it's goal, the product doesn't go into production and nobody gets charged anything.

If anything your argument is against crowdfunding as a whole and your scenario is actually much more likely to happen with small crowdfunded projects than it is with programs like the one Sony has started.

Being a multi-million dollar company doesn't mean anything, take a look at the massive failures of Steam's Early Access games (which is a similar concept to crowd funding).

A lot of crap comes and goes to all game store services (Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, Eshop), there's very little quality control in all of them, I don't see why a crowd fund service will be different. 

At the end of day, Sony (or any other company for that matter) cares about the money more than anything else, if the 5 guy dev team in the basement pays their percentage to Sony, but screws the customer, they most likely won't care; it was what the customers "wanted".

You seem to misunderstand the nature of this program. This isn't a crowdfunding hosted by Sony that allows outside groups to ask for money. Every project up for funding is started by a Sony employee and if a product reaches it's goal it's Sony themselves that make, and distribute it.