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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23 2017, @04:51PM
"massive fuckup on all fronts"? I'm not entirely sure how you get to that declaration, but if that's how you feel... They promised at minimum X, then upped it to Y, then again to Z. Their communication strategy has been spotty - excellent in some areas, less so in others, downright bad in still others. They've blown through timelines, yet what they deliver has made me forgive the delays. They probably took on more than they should have right out of the gate, and they've gone back and redone some work as better solutions became available (slowing things down again), but the thing is - it works. It's nowhere near full Release quality yet, but even now it's far better than some games I've seen packaged and shipped out.
On the whole, I'm satisfied. I'd like more, but I'm not angry with them.