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[Scelly9]

Why should he give out his product for free?

He is already charging for his product. The 25000 dollars would be profits from doing nothing.

Fine. Why should he give out his work for free?
I don't know about you, but I think that "doing nothing" is certainly not what goes into a successful kickstarter. What about having the idea, promoting it, spending the time to make a good video and an entry, contacting the people he needs to draw the cards, investing something into it so they produce any art at all, scouting various printing services, ect.

[Neonivek]

Why should he give out his work for free?

He is not he is charging an arm and a leg.

As well "Paying himself" would be included in the $500 dollars.

What was he going to be a slave if he didn't get SUPER overfunded?

[Draco18s]

He is already charging for his product. The 25000 dollars would be profits from doing nothing.

Unless we are going to get into "Double Charging"

When we add rewards there is an aspect that the "extra funding" is profits and that is fine.

Let's put it like this, and this is very very simple:

Guy asks for $5000 to make his AwesomeGame.

He prices a copy at $50 to the customer, meaning that he needs 100 people to back his project to make his goal.

He works out his costs as such:

100 copies at $20/copy = $2000 (expensive for such a small print run)
Shipping on 100 copies ($10 per) = $1000
Time and effort spent: $5/hour for 100 hours = $500 per person times 3 people = $1500
Kickstarter/Amazon cut: $500
Total: $5000

He gets inundated with orders, he now has 1000 orders to fill, and the project has raised $50,000.

He recalculates how much it'll cost to have copies printed, and it turns out he can get them for half-price per unit because the print run got larger.  $10,000 instead of the originally estimated $20,000 ($2,000 * 10 times as many copies).
His time spent on the project hasn't gone up at all, and he and his friends decide that the game doesn't really have any opportunities for an expansion, so there isn't really anything they can offer people in terms of stretch goals.

They do decide to pay themselves a bit more than minimum wage, though, and up their hourly to $15.  $4,500 total for that line item.

They can't reduce the reward tier price, though.  Kickstarter doesn't allow you to change a reward after someone's chosen it.

What do they do with the extra $10,500?  Do they give every backer $10 back?  Do they keep it?

What happens if this wasn't the end of their campaign and suddenly they don't have a thousand copies, they have FIVE thousand and their price-per-unit costs go down even more?

[Aklyon]

You forgot to add-in the cost of failed pledges Draco, but other than that its pretty good.

[Neonivek]

What do they do with the extra $10,500?  Do they give every backer $10 back?  Do they keep it?

They will keep it because Kickstarter doesn't let you do otherwise.

However lets say their game only needed 1-10th that cash to make and that the whole kickstarter was a sham. Kickstarter fully supports this can encourages them to do it.

They are still delivering. They just happened to make the requirement for their project much higher then they actually needed in order to gouge the community and make them think there was more work going into their project then they thought. Thus Kickstarter not only has no issue with this, but they fully support it and indirrectly endorse such actions.

[Draco18s]

You forgot to add-in the cost of failed pledges Draco, but other than that its pretty good.

It's relatively small, to be honest.  Even my project only had six, and I think we managed to get a hold of and get money from five of them (we had more trouble getting a hold of our high end backers and what they wanted for their customized rewards!).
(and we had one person who spazzed out and wanted a refund, meh, whatever).
Anyway, it was a simple example.

There was some other largeish project recently I've been following.  Forget which one.  Ah, found it.  Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption.  21 failed pledges out of over 6000.

They are still delivering. They just happened to make the requirement for their project much higher then they actually needed in order to gouge the community and make them think there was more work going into their project then they thought. Thus Kickstarter not only has no issue with this, but they fully support it and indirrectly endorse such actions.

Projects fail if you don't "gouge" for a few dollars here and there.  A smaller goal -> better chance of success.
My group had to charge $50 for our game to ship within the US, despite being only about 200 playing cards and a couple of mats.  If anything, we didn't price it high enough to cover costs.  It turned out to be in our favor, due to having a distributor who will be throwing in their own money in order to make a larger initial print run (cheaper on both ends: for us to deliver KS rewards and for them to have initial inventory).  We were told on multiple fronts that we likely didn't charge enough in order to cover international shipping costs.

[Neonivek]

You don't get refunds on Kickstarter because you are not buying anything. The rewards are enticement.

You are funding a project. You have no expectation to a refund because the product was lousy unless, of course, your money was misappropriated or the project was cancelled without spending any money.

Mind you... In both those cases (Your money misused and they cancelling the project and taking your cash anyway) you wouldn't get your cash back on kickstarter.

Projects fail if you don't "gouge" for a few dollars here and there.

Yeah except this isn't about creating a Windfall or selling your product. This is "When kickstarter goes wrong" not "When people use kickstarter for perfectly legit and ethical means".

Now if you are saying there is no way to abuse the kickstarter system to do ethically and legally dubious actions then we are going somewhere

But the major obsticle in this conversation is everytime I bring a point you keep bringing up "Well I ran a perfectly legitimate project so there!" Which I allow you to do because as long as you arn't actually addressing my points I've made them unchallenged.

Now as for the "Whatever you raise in a project is your to do what you want and thus you can pocket as much as you wish" point you made. Which you oddly didn't support... That is where I argue there is an ethical aspect here especially in light of how NORMAL project funding goes out of Kickstarter.

When you recieve funding you are given money with the intent that the money is used for the project. Hiring yourself is one of those and thus you actually have room to make money off a project. If you have more money then you are willing to spend on the project, normally you would either return part of their investment or reward the investors. Since Kickstarter doesn't opperate under this logic it means that corner cutting and pocketing the difference is not only legal but encouraged. As well as misrepresenting your project.

Kickstarter goes wrong when people realise that Kickstarter doesn't function the same way and find ways to pocket the most of their project funds. In otherwords Embezzlement. Legal Embezzlement. There is making money off of Kickstarter, a practice I am all for, and then there is this.

[alway]

Or, in other words, it is exactly what I have been saying it is all along: You see something shiny on your monitor, yell "SHUTUP AND TAKE MY MONEY," before cramming wads of cash at the people on the computer.

[Neonivek]

Or, in other words, it is exactly what I have been saying it is all along: You see something shiny on your monitor, yell "SHUTUP AND TAKE MY MONEY," before cramming wads of cash at the people on the computer.

You must need new monitors all the time with all the cash wadded ones.

[Scelly9]

Have you ever thrown a wad of cash at a monitor? It doesn't exactly stick.

[Neonivek]

Have you ever thrown a wad of cash at a monitor? It doesn't exactly stick.

He said Crammed not thrown. You ever crammed wads of cash into your monitor? It doesn't exactly come out easily, nor does it seem to like it.

[Scelly9]

Have you ever thrown a wad of cash at a monitor? It doesn't exactly stick.

He said Crammed not thrown. You ever crammed wads of cash into your monitor? It doesn't exactly come out easily, nor does it seem to like it.

Oh my. Yes, that could be quite bad for your monitor.

[tryrar]

Can we stop having these discussions on what kickstarter is and just go back to mocking shitty/failed projects please? We get it already, there are opportunities for scams/misrepresentations to happen, but that's really just par for the course, and you seem to be lumping ALL projects in with the scams neon, which is plain wrong. You REALLY expect someone who asks for money to return any extra money they recieve? (Say you get more change back from a register than you needed, would you return it? And if you say yes, good for you, you are not the average person, who WOULDN'T)

[Neonivek]

Tryrar indeed we could go back to playfully mocking kickstarters at anytime.

Do you have one?

Asking for a topic change without providing a topic change is futile.

you seem to be lumping ALL projects in with the scams neon

I am?

You REALLY expect someone who asks for money to return any extra money they recieve?

I would challenge you that the average person would return the extra cash. I can think of plenty of situations entirely in the norm. Want to try them out?

For example you didn't bring your lunch to school today and someone gives you twenty bucks to buy a lunch with because they don't have smaller bills expecting the change. You discover you brought your lunch to school.

In your scenario you keep the money.

By the by this scenario happened to me in real life. No one liked that guy. He tended to pay people back with money he borrows from other people. Shuffling debt to give himself more time.

[Darvi]

I wouldn't. If you didn't want me to have the extra money, then why did you give it to me in the first place?