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Gareth Everard has an interesting article on TechCrunch discussing what he believes crowdfunding will look like in the near future.
The golden age of irrational exuberance on Kickstarter has ended — Pebble is shutting down, marking the fall of crowdfunding's white knight after a string of other high-profile closures and failures.
Originally positioned as a medium for (especially arts-related) projects to garner modest seed funding from a diverse group of supporters, crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo have obviously evolved since their respective launches in 2009 and 2008. Yes, crowdfunding has produced some inspiring success stories that have grown into innovative businesses, like Peak Design and Flow Hive.
However, it also has facilitated the transfer of significant sums of money to teams that ultimately proved themselves to be incompetent, leaving backers with nothing. Recent headlines have been chock full of projects that have declared bankruptcy or otherwise betrayed their early backers, exposing cases where founders' and companies' egos have simply overtaken their ability to reason, plan and communicate logically or truthfully.
Have the high profile failures doomed crowdfunding?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Monday January 23 2017, @02:05PM
Same here.
My kickstarters have all been quite successful, and I've "profited" from their existence more than if they never came to be.
But I research, and check experience, and trust in the developers of them, whether card games, board games, computer games, etc. And you'll notice they're all "games", i.e. disposal income for something I won't miss if it never happens.
And I see an awful lot of scammy ones and ones that have overpromised, or just taken the money and run, and you can see that was what would happen from day one.
Investment is not without risk. Fronting up hundreds of dollars/pounds/euros is a risk. Even with the best intentions in the world, if they can't make the product in time, they could easily go bankrupt under the swathe or refund requests, failed manufacturing or just mismanagement of funds.
But the fact is that these things can fail like any other company. There are games on my Steam list that no longer work because the company gave up or went out of business. I paid for them, and they just don't work any more and I have nothing to show for that. It's not unique to Kickstarter.
People who kickstart large, expensive projects with no history, background checking, experience, questioning, market research, viability analysis etc. pretty much get what any similar investor in any other similar environment would get - nothing, because they fell for the hype.
You don't have to be a genius. The reason most of these projects "have never been done" is because other people failed or it's just not viable. You don't have to dig out your lawyers and IP specialists to work out where they are going to be a risk. You just need a modicum of common sense and pay no more than necessary.
One of the projects I backed had an option for $5000 to meet the developers of the game in person. I couldn't see why anyone would do that, but they did. I often wonder whether that person - a few years down the line now - felt that it was worth doing.
Hell, I've had products ordered from large established firms in the past who suddenly go bankrupt without warning and lost my money. But it's never been enough to worry about. Kickstarter is that, multiplied by the ineptitude of inexperience.
Caveat emptor. But that doesn't mean Kickstarter is necessarily bad, evil or worse than any other similar option, on- or off-line.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday January 23 2017, @02:50PM
I'd agree with those observations.
The $5000 is for corporate donors. Given what Coke and Pepsi spend, $5K is kinda cheap advertising for them.
Another example of crazy high donor levels is from the Arachne clojure library kickstarter where $3K gets you a training class for your company and $10K buys you a seat on the project steering board. Frankly that's pretty cheap. They released their alpha a few days ago, I need to get some spare time to mess with that.
The problem stated in the article
the fall of crowdfunding
and the editor question at the end
doomed crowdfunding
seem to miss the point that currently its incredibly successful business model:
Originally positioned as a medium for (especially arts-related) projects to garner modest seed funding from a diverse group of supporters
I donno if you'd necessarily call DnD players diverse, the outside view looking in on RPG for decades has always been weird (see for example Jack Chick tracts claiming DnD leads to excessive dangerous amounts of teen premarital sex which was never really a problem I saw from the inside looking out) but diverse or not its got a comfortable place in the market between the noobs in the world of Print on Demand (RPGnow, victorypoint games before they gave up on POD, etc) and the really big publishers (Paizo, for example).
All this word choice of falling, betrayal, bankrupt, incompetent, I mean sure kickstarter doesn't appear to be the picnic cooler, wrist watch, or drone supplier of the future, but they're doing so incredibly well at their original core competency that I can't see how they can fail as a company, other than some kind of massive over-extension, maybe. And being a dotcom if they implode the market will belch forth a clone of them in about 5 minutes that lives in happy successful RPG/gaming marketplace.
So in summary they're too successful at their core competency to fail, but if they failed, their original spot in the marketplace is so successful that someone will step up and redo what works because there's obviously money on the table.
I suppose a company can be a huge raging influential success yet still be a failure from the perspective of the VCs who were expecting a trillion dollar exit and instead are stuck with merely a couple million/yr in revenue in perpetuity.
Perhaps the fundamental problem is there's no print on demand / etsy / ebay equivalent for hardware noobs, or rephrased, total hardware noobs are trying to mis-use kickstarter when they should be noob-ing things up somewhere else, somewhere less risky. Kickstarter success rate seems near 100% for sellers who aren't total noobs at what they're doing.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Thexalon on Monday January 23 2017, @04:37PM
Chick Tracts tend to be excellent examples of unintentional comedy. The idea that teenaged DnD players get laid frequently, especially excessive to dangerous amounts, is just hilarious. Although if it did, I think I would have spent a lot more time trying to level up my elven fighter/thief than I did.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday January 23 2017, @06:20PM
Yeah, seems like every complaint listed also applies to the Stock Market.