The $100M Deal for Kickstarter to use Blockchain

The speculative investment stuff was the scam Kickstarter cultivated in the chase for infinite growth and VC returns. Crowdfunding from the general public for investment is generally illegal for exactly this rest.

I understand where you're coming from; I believe the premise is that because Kickstarter receive their fee whether projects deliver or not, that it's profitable to not remove any projects. That's of course true in the short term.

But the cumulative effect of that myopia is that the projects seeking funding on the platform has plateaued for years. The resulting lack of trust in the system has culminated in fewer projects using Kickstarter, because fewer users trust Kickstarter to adequately police projects. Robust project policing would lead to greater trust, a greater number of projects reaching funding goals, and ultimately more fees for the company. It's emphatically in their interest to remove unsavory projects, regardless of the immediate fee loss. The increase in trust is a multiplier that'll far exceed any immediate loss.

Are there any reasons that may be the case?

I'm sure different people use Patreon differently, but there's never really been a trust problem with Patreon for me because the sums are so small and I can stop paying whenever I like.

People on kickstarter are understandably salty when they pay $350 for a chair and it doesn't show up.

But if I pay someone $5/month for youtube videos and their output slows down or drops in quality, I can just stop paying, and keep getting the videos for free on youtube.

This is basically the problem with stretch goals in a nutshell. Once you get a lot of money and interest, it's easy to add more and more promises to keep people adding money to the pot.

The problem is that each of these things requires more time and effort (sometimes even exponentially more), so you end up stuck in a quagmire of 'fulfil a huge laundry list of promised features before you run out of money'.

I suspect Patreon has some of this for similar reasons. The more money you make, the higher people's expectations are, and the more insane your own promises will get to try and justify the amount of money you're bringing in.

And yeah, that's another good point there. At least half the time, the problem with these projects isn't that they're intentional scams. It's that they're run by people who've never had to launch a product/business before (especially not on a large scale) and severely underestimate the amount of work, time and money required to get it to market. Making say, $200K on a $50K campaign for a new indie game is great and all, except when you need to hire 20+ people to work on it, pay them salaries, pay for tools, potentially pay for office space, pay for certification for consoles/Steam, pay for the website and marketing and trailer production and voice acting and...

Suddenly, all that money lasts you maybe 3 months.

A lot of projects go that way.

They only need to win once. When you’re the chip leader, you can afford to throw down some big bets and lose.

If it was done in real life too I'm actually at the point where I think that guy is a prophet ;)

In any event, I'm not sure that I'd call this successful, precisely. Might be in the future, who knows, can't on a cursory look find anything concrete about usership. But isn't now.

(Also, personally I would not have named a social network thingy over a fake transport system run by evil computers, but that's just me.)

For me it comes down to numbers. I don't want for games to play. I already lack the time to play all the games I am interested in.

And that's for games that have been released that are a relatively known result.

What advantage is there for me to throw money at hypothetical games that in the future may result in something I am interested in playing? Especially when there is a decent chance nothing gets released at all?

I took part in one campaign for a video game last year, but it's a niche game in a niche genre, so I don't think it's been covered anywhere. Though two video game projects I backed in 2020 & 2021 have likely been covered, though I haven't kept up with the news. And I agree that the gaming press have stopped covering crowdfunding, mostly I guess because all the failed projects and scams, not helped by the long delays.

But as this is all ancient history why did Kickstarter walk back their anti-tech / anti-hardware position? At the time it felt like they really wanted to double down on artistic creators.

Ie Lockitron raised $2.2m in presales with it. Tile raised $2.6m in presales with it. And so on.

Unlike Kickstarter it did not take a 8-10% fee of funds raised. It was not a primary business for us. Just something we casually maintained because we coincidentally had a bunch of payment processors in our YC batch that year so spinning it up was less than a weekend’s worth of work given our connections.

I am pretty indifferent now but at the time I was infuriated that Kickstarter drew an arbitrary line between a creative and a founder. It simultaneously marketed itself as the democratic fundraising platform for artists and was perfectly opaque (and self-contradictory) on which projects they would gatekeep from their platform once they started getting heat from places like NPR.

At the time I took a hardline approach that the way to do good was to give people access to tools not restrict them from a platform. Enough time has passed that I see that’s a bit reductive.