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[Neonivek]

We gambled and lost. I don't throw a tantrum at the casino when it comes up red instead of black, and I'm not entitled to a winning result.

False equivocasy.

Using the Casino example... This would be the equivalent of putting a coin in for the slot machine... and it doesn't start, eating your coin.

End result is the same either way...

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Once again... it isn't a donation, it isn't a pre-order. You are literally funding the game. You are a "producer" so to speak.

You think people are bad? You think people are unruly entitled brats? Well welcome to the real world where the person paying you can actually veto your decisions.

The GOOD part about Kickstarter is that it gives the artist a LOT of freedom to make their product without having someone overlooking and altering their work... AND it lets you put "Dollar votes" towards games you like without a producer needing to go "But do people really want this?"

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And also Entitled brats?

May I remind you that the ONLY input people have... is their words.

Producers actually have a say... Kickstarter's system ensures they do not. The fact that people can talk and complain all they want is a fair compromise.

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I guess it is to say... "WHAAAA! People are entitled because their opinion is different then mine!" is pretty much what is going on here.

Since once again... These people are LITERALLY Entitled. Not figuratively, morally, or philosophically. They are literally and legally entitled. There is literally a contract that has been signed that you HAVE to sign that makes them entitled.

[nenjin]

Producer implies some sort of executive level control over the operation. We don't have that, and no Kickstarter backer does. You're not a producer when you are entirely at the mercy of the developer to allow you to make any decisions about the game or how it's developed. If we were producers we would have told him to turn over that alpha/beta/whatever 9 months ago.

You're an investor, looking for a non-monetary return on your investment. Investment is a risky business even when you don't stand to make money as your ROI. We're investors who are not giving on an annual fee to see the project to completion. We're investors who have given all they will give and are now just waiting for it to succeed or fail. Despite all the "couldn't have happened without you"s, we are now completely secondary to actual process of the game being worked on, finished and sold.

And gamers would not be the first investors in history to get burned with little to no recourse for it. Let's not confuse how important we are in the scope of this.

[sirvente]

Kickstarter is quite explicitly not gambling. While crowdsourcing is still rather untested legally, failure to deliver has and will continue to be a good way to open yourself up for lawsuits.

[TempAcc]

There's some legal precedent, and prospects aren't great for crowdfunding project creators. Guy is being sued for "deceptive tactics", essentialy not using the project money, well, on the project, and not working on the project when he said he was and lying about the current state of the project.

Sound familiar? Its something that has been observed in a fair bit of kickstarter projects by now.

[forsaken1111]

That's  victim blaming you know

You're perfectly well within your rights to complain about something if you feel like you've been wronged, but you should respond in a manner that won't stop the people from fixing what is wrong. It's like you feel like you've been wronged because your landlord wouldn't fix your sink for a whole year, so you've decided not to let him in the apartment to fix it now that he wants to try. Or heckling him while he's doing it, so he's so distracted he screws up

[JumpingJack]

I doubt that any verbal smack-downs the backers/investors can do now will have any particular effect on whether the game flops or not. If it fails by August, I'm confident in presuming that there either hasn't been anything workable for awhile, or wasn't ever anything to begin with. It really sucks that the mods feel the need to jump ship, but they don't need to put up with what they can't handle, and I can't say that I wouldn't want to do the same.

Honestly, in my opinion, if TWS ends up not bearing fruit, the biggest loss will be the modding potential it offered. I've had quite a few ideas for campaigns lined up for some time, and I can't think of a single other game at the moment that could serve as a replacement for this one.

I continue to be genuinely amazed by the pettiness and entitlement displayed by people on the internet. People who've donated as much as $300- possibly a full days work! People who use the amount other unrelated people have contributed to justify their own outrage over a failed project that was never guaranteed to succeed. People who have kept updated and in the know about something for over a year in order that they may continually complain about it. I have yet to run into this behaviour offline, but maybe I'm lucky.

From what I've heard, there were in fact large stretches of time without any communication regarding progress. Not sure exactly how long, but eh. And yes, you're quite lucky, as I can't turn on the news without seeing a critical mass of people who think they're entitled to something or other.

Getting close to Godwin’s law in the main thread over at KDG, so... ugh.

I did nazi that coming.

[Cthulhu]

Gambling, an investment, a donation, kickstarter is whatever suits my current argument.

[Egan_BW]

It's a donation and always has been. They're called "rewards", not "products".

[Neonivek]

It's a donation and always has been. They're called "rewards", not "products".

Still under the obligation to use that money towards producing the product they are advertised to the best of their ability.

EVEN if the person funding it has no promise of a reward.

Which makes Kickstarters different from most charities... Since charities are under no obligation to actually do what they set out to do (and quite often... they don't or do bare minimum).

So a kickstarter cannot, for example, offer superfluous rewards... then take the rest of the money and not actually create the product.

[sirvente]

No one whose opinion matters holds that view Egan. Go read the terms of use.

[Ludorum Rex]

I think the one things backers can expect (and which Kickstarter places a lot of emphasis on) is solid communication, transparency and honesty. Even in the face of adversity. That's actually more difficult than it sounds. Interacting with backers is time consuming and plain hard work, and not the kind of hard work people are thinking of, when they take the dive into game development.

I would never fault a project for failing to deliver, being late, changing direction or simply slashing parts of the design or stretch goals. However, dishonesty, marketing hype and poor communication is a general problem in indie game crowdfunding. There are so many awesome things about the TWS project, but I am a bit disappointed they marred this with a strangely dishonest and opaque development process. A shame really - even being honest about their actual progress, they could easily have had a very successful Kickstarter. Or they could've waited a year or two and worked on actually having the beta they were promising, and not playing catch-up once they got funded.

In my opinion, this is a sad story about a great idea that fell flat due to developers underestimating the work required to actually make the game - and the work required to keep interacting and informing the fans and backers. There is probably also an element of flat out dishonesty - but I am sure this was never with a nefarious intent, I think they did expect to deliver within the promised time frame, but once they failed, there was really no way to explain it out without admitting the initial deception.

[TempAcc]

Its funny how despite there being lawsuits and crackdowns on kickstarter projects going on, people still go around saying ~its gambling~, ~its a donation~, ~its whatever i want it to be despite the fact the terms of use and the lawsuits going on point otherwise~, etc.

Plus, just like Ludorum Rex pointed out, nobody is ~lol heckling the dev~ for possibly failing to deliver, since that is not the problem. A lot of funded projects fail and their managers/devs come out and tell people about it. Everyone gets sad, sure, but thats the gist of it.

The problem is completely and utterly failing at basic project communication, creating a hype for it by presenting the project as mostly working then basically going full radio silence then comming out with the fact he doesnt have a working version up and that the people he used to actualy keep in touch with the community actualy never even saw the game that was presented in the videos. Whats worse is that he actualy threw out a timeframe for it, failed to deliver, and then instead of admitting that he couldn't deliver things anytime soon and showing people the real status of things, he just kind of kept throwing out timeframes and failing them to the point he alienated a huge chunk of the community.

Nobody knew what the hell was happening. Nobody could go "hey, X and Y is happening to the project, yea, it sucks, but the guy is trying" because it was like the guy just kinda fell out of the edge of the world and even the people who supposedly had some contact with him would have no answers. People were actualy more worried about the dev himself rather than the project for a good while.

It is quite reasonable for the community to keep getting more and more skeptic about all of it considering how events unfolded. Remember that one guy who asked for a refund and make a blog post about how he was suspicious of the whole thing? Almost the entire community didn't agree with him and still put faith in the project. You'd think that a project manager would go "hey, this happened, maybe I should try to do some sort of damage control and actualy talk to the community now and show them what problems I'm facing", except that didn't happen until MUCH later, and sudden that one refund guy started to seem more and more reasonable since the dev just kept silent like a guilty child.

[ndkid]

It's a donation and always has been. They're called "rewards", not "products".

If a pledge drive told me that donating $50 would get me a t-shirt, and they tell me how cool the t-shirt is, and how there's never been a t-shirt like it, so I donate money, and they never send me the t-shirt, I would be pissed, and I'd probably be willing to participate in a class action lawsuit over it. This is worse, because most donations are to non-profits that I can get a tax break for... KS doesn't even give me that.

Having said that, the fact that any of us are still bickering over what backing a Kickstarter project this many years after Kickstarter launched is impressive. There's no sign that social norms around crowdsourcing are coalescing toward either pole, and, at least in the US, when legal action has been sought, the result has differed greatly by how the DA/BBB/whatever want to proceed. As far as I can tell, when those state actors have gotten involved, no KS has held their ground... they've capitulated to make the problem go away. No state or federal legislature in the US is in a hurry to codify policy around crowdsourcing. My point being: this difference of opinion isn't going away anytime soon. We can keep having the same arguments over and over about the moral, social, and legal rights and responsibilities of backers and artists, but, when we do so, we should at least have the self-awareness that we're doing so to hear ourselves talk, and not to change minds. (That's true of my first paragraph, above; this paragraph, I really am trying to change minds.)

[Egan_BW]

Well, in saying your second paragraph, don't expect me to ignore your first.

Suing a non-profit that you donated to seems really dishonest to me. If you're willing to sue them, then why did you donate to them in the first place? just to get a shirt? If that was your aim, why didn't you actually just buy a shirt? This is obviously not completely analogous to a game kickstarter, but it sums up my opinion.

[ThtblovesDF]

I always felt like its pretty much the same as with publishers / investors for regular game companys. You just take the role of the publisher/investor combined.