Development on Remix OS and related consumer products is being discontinued

Exactly, there's a difference between failure and fraud.

If you're soliciting donations to advance your OS development, then pitch the project as such. If you're promising backers a physical good, and then you decide to pivot, keep the money, and not deliver the backers anything or return their money, then people will obviously feel like you've defrauded them.

Unfortunately from a legal perspective, crowd funding backers have little to no legal recourse when businesses decide to use their contributions as an interest free loan for their other business operations.

In that sense, having an investor take care of the funding so that the product comes to market is a good thing for the kickstarter pledger. Presumably a successful kickstarter campaign helped secure the investor. It's a success from that perspective.

Anecdotal, of course, but "small chance" for me is that I have received 28 out of 29 projects I've helped fund in roughly the time-frame outlined. Only one project did I simply waste money on (the Lunecase for iPhone). For me, that's a 96.6% success rate of crowdfunded items I've backed.

The reason I crowdfund is for the product, sure, but also for the extras that the main product won't have upon release. It's not so much bragging rights, I couldn't care less about that. It's because I feel like I'm getting more for my money, well, because I am.

Maybe I'm just lucky.

Since none of these require a huge R&D effort, delivery is pretty much guaranteed (although any number of external factors might cause a delay).

So what's the difference to Amazon? Essentially, none of the products involved would be any profitable if produced on an individual basis, and independent creators can't really afford to print a hundred copies of their books in hopes of someone actually buying them. Using crowdfunding, they can gauge demand and then get a volume discount by printing a large number of books at once.

It all boils down to what you use crowdfunding for. I would never fund an effort to develop a new widget from scratch, but I might chip in to have a convincingly demonstrated prototype mass-manufactured when the alternative would be to not get it at all.

And yeah I've backed a couple gadgets too, they never came to market. So? It was like $35 total, and maybe two a year. I think I'll be alright.

As with most things, if you can't afford the risk, don't take it.

But for consumer goods I'm buying what you're selling here.

But in any case, I don't see any problems with this. The terms are completely clear and I know what I am getting into. I fund projects because I want them to succeed but I am well aware that they might not. As long as I get the impression that it didn't fail because of foul play, I am happy.

The benefit being some 33% proce reduction, or a special in-game kickstarter item, or a forum badge, or a little physical good related to the game and production costs vastly underestimated, or some other nonsense.

That people buy into this, I don't like at all. But the arrogance, stupidity and outright malicious of the devs that make use of it is infinitely more offensive. And thats just amongst the once-respectable developers..

This depends on the project. Board games, RPG books, and food products ship just fine. Some of the best food I've had has come courtesy of Kickstarter campaigns.

Computer games are hit or miss. They all end up late, but I got'em. My glowing plants are apparently never coming (https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/04/whatever...), but other than that, and with the exception of some fudge that was quite mediocre, I've been happy with my Kickstarter purchases, and Kickstarter has allowed me access to types of products that otherwise would not have existed.