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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

I view Kickstarter contributions as a form of gambling: even if the Kickstarter reaches its goal, the odds are heavily stacked against you that something will actually get produced and shipped, but if it does then it's pretty sweet.

The trick, as a backer, is to keep your expectations low and not get too emotionally attached to whatever you are backing.

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The risk is extremely variable though depending on what products you're backing. For simpler items so far I've had extremely good luck with things eventually coming. Only once have aI not received something and I think that was USPSs fault (I wasn't getting half my mail at the time because the apartment box still had the old name in it).

The problem is that many Kickstarter campaigns are now offering a non-existing product as the main reward that people are paying for. Under the Kickstarter Terms of Service, they are obligated to deliver all rewards upon the successful funding of the campaign.

that's pretty much the whole point. and has been since the first kickstarter project i backed in, let's see... december 2011.

I have backed many things over the years, constantly with lower and lower expectations.

The only 2 products that really surpassed expectations for me were Pebble and Divinity: Original Sin. Everything else has basically been somewhere between a flop and a trainwreck.

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