I see one or two people mention Sony should use a free vote system instead of crowd funding. The problem with that is anyone who doesn't like Sony (and there are plenty) will just troll a system like that with false votes. Asking for a monetary pledge of some kind weedles out many of the kiddies that would pull this kind of stunt (not all, but when someone has to authenticate any kind of payment details whether it be Amazon, Paypal or PSN this scares off much of the rubbish).

This crowd funding site reminds me of GMT's (board and card game company) old P500 system. They would ask for pre-orders for about 30 different types of games, and any of those games that obtained 500+ pre orders would succeed and the physical development on that game would begin (they'd continue to take more pre orders afterwards). Using this system meant that GMT never had to worry about designing things no one was interested in.

Yeah, I'm not giving multi-billion dollar companies my money for unfinished products.
I wonder what the reactions in this thread (or on the internet) would be if Nintendo decided to do this.

I might be wrong here but this sounds like Sony looking at an avenue for Projects from Sony employees rather than Sony R&D itself ,  quite often a lot of staff especially those with an engineering /science background in large companies with a product based focus find that a lot of their employees , some times it one person or it might invole a collaboration .

These projects/ideas may have come about from an earlier project or their field of expertise or  something else (the paths to conception can be myriad) ,but because  they don't fit into the normal R&D structures a lot of these type of projects never get see whether they have a viable future let alone get an opportunity to be funded. sure there would be examples of products or ideas that have escaped this trap but it's usually through happenstance .

My reason for liking the look of this is it gives people working at Sony a pathway to gauge their inventions and the public gets to decide whether they see enough potential to take a risk and  back them.
Sony also wins because they get to see and make decisions on these projects (a lot that maybe wouldn't have seen daylight) in a more comprehsive manner.

Nothing is perfect and if you think taking peoples money first is a better option on what they think they know what they want then good luck. Nintendo hit a wave of success because they did something different with the DS and Wii, doesnt always work as they looked at gamers wanting HD graphics and look what happen with the WiiU. Id rather have proper paid people who have degrees in the market then relying on a bunch of kids donating money on something they have no idea what is needed or what they really want.

Good, the products on offer actually are pretty much finished (I assume details can still be changed if there is big demand among the supporters), they just wouldn't go into production without this "funding" (it's more like a preorder really). Market research probably indicated low consumer interest so the higher ups decided against releasing them via the normal retail channels.

Like this the consumer misses out on many production ready products each year and that site empowers people to at least make a small production run happen for the goods they are interested in (once in a blue moon a product may even garner enough demand for a later full-scale production/retail release this way). And contrary to Kickstarter there is consumer protection - a big company like Sony wouldn't want to tarnish their reputation especially among their most loyal customers (who I expect to make up the bulk of the users of that platform).

So spare me the implicated "you are hypocrites" accusation, when your post shows you didn't spent any time investigating and thinking through what the website is actually about.

That's why inovation is expensive,  with backers money,  they ( SONY EMPLOYES) will at least will get pay even if they failed in market, and SONY is not going bankrupt on the Industry = Win - win situation.  and if the product is success in the market then the money the backers crow fund will be pay back to the backers. do you really read the article, SONY paid the worker but they also relies with crowfunding if people want to add another project beside SONY PROJECT, because SONY cannot provide everything and cannot ammuse every costumer, they have their own project. But with this they can provide both. You need to read back OP.