They needed to make some sort of move, but banning simulations and renderings (Really?) seems to be terrible overkill.
If anything, this move makes it much more a store. You can only put up products that exist. There's no funding of development.
Not sure this is a good solution on their part.
EDIT: Fully in support of the "Risks and Challenges" section. Makes it like an investment prospectus.
I may be wrong. But can someone point to some concrete examples? Fraud is a pretty heavy charge to level against Kickstarter projects, and it's also an indirect accusation that Kickstarter is a hotbed of such activity.
Is this the standard we want?
If you used an investment service which said "we require proof beyond all reasonable doubt of criminal endeavors before taking down [some UGC]," how much would you trust those investments? What if the standard for takedowns was a bit higher?
I'd say so, yes. Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat
Proof beyond all reasonable doubt is a lovely standard for a criminal justice system. Note that it is not used in civil suits in America - only criminal cases.
We're not talking about taking away people's freedom here. We're talking about an investment website.
In general with Kickstarter failures current and future, I think we'll find the evidence weighs heavily in favor of incompetence rather than malice. There's no shortage in the world of business ventures that are honest to goodness failures.
Is anyone arguing that mere accusations should result in kickstarter takedowns? You make a good point... just a sort of obvious one.
This is clearly a hard problem, and neither extreme of "proof beyond reasonable doubt" or "accusation = takedown" works. Maybe that's why this space is so unexplored! That doesn't absolve Kickstarter from having to discover the palatable middle ground.
Hard work is hard, and I think today's announcements are part of that hard work. So I say: keep it up, Kickstarter!
Yes, it should - if it's backed by a legal letter, Kickstarter might be liable too, if the suit is sucessful.
Takedowns due to "mere accusations" to me means that I can fire off an e-mail if I see a kickstarter project that looks sketchy and have it taken down post-haste.
To me, that is highly suboptimal.
Since the answer is clearly "yes" - then taking some steps to reduce the impact of these vulnerabilities seem reasonable. If you are selling a product, show us the product. If you do not have a product, we want to be sure the backers know this.
[1] The reason US required QUIbs and the SEC and the related regulatory structure (re: financial investment contracts) is precisely to create such bright line playing fields. But these lines are sufficiently complex to require a "price of admission".
The skills, knowledge, and resources to produce 1k widgets is totally different than producing 1MM widgets. I might be able to brute-force manufacture 1k widgets from my garage and that would kickstart the business if that's my skill and scale estimate. I need staff, facilities and a different type of supplier if I need to make millions, and I may not have what it takes to deliver on that.
True, Kickstarter should be trying to address the issue, regardless of its cause. But let's be careful before leaping to the conclusion that people have been acting in bad faith.
I don't know. On the other hand, if you leave a loophole in a system, it will be exploited; that's a basic human law. So in this case I'd guess both scenarios occur - there are so many assholepreneurs out there trying to find a way to "creatively" earn money that I wouldn't be surprised if those design scams were occuring more and more often.
http://betabeat.com/2012/04/this-is-what-a-kickstarter-scam-...
I guess Kickstarter is aiming to fund physical projects that already have a working prototype and require funding to deliver in large quantities.
It seems fair to me, as the person requesting funding should be required to have put in a fair amount of effort beyond a flashy 3 minute video promising the world. A working prototype seems to be a fair bar.
They certainly had their challenges - but would have had no chance without a big group of people ordering up front.
I use Solidworks for mechanical design and Modo for photorealistic rendering. I assure you that, with enough skill and effort, one can make photorealistic renderings that, to the uninformed, look like the product is ready to go and that the funding is a mere formality. No, Kickstarter did the right thing here.
That said, I am hoping that they will allow 3D renderings and animations as added illustrations if and ONLY if one shows actual realized versions of the proposed hardware in the project. The reason I say this is that 3D renderings and animations are extremely useful tools for the communication of function and some ideas that might be hard or impossible to convey using actual hardware. A good example is a cross-sectional cut showing moving parts.
I wonder if in the future there will be a requirement to limit the number of backers on every project. Logically there seems to be a point where additional money from backers over what was asked for leads to difficulty delivering at all.
For instance, say I could make 10 custom widgets a month at $100 a piece. I might decide to launch a Kickstarter project asking for $1200 to gauge if at least 10 other people are interested in my fancy innovative widget. What happens if I end up raising $12000? My target of 20% profit on each widget is no longer possible unless the backers are willing to wait up to 10 months for me to deliver. The only other option is to invest money into producing widgets in larger volume to meet this initial demand. That investment would only make sense if there were some reasonable expectation that demand would stay at the same level after the Kickstarter project ended.
So back to my original cynicism, maybe Kickstarter sees signs that some very good marketers are having enormous success with Kickstarter projects whilst being in completely over their heads...
If all they do is port some small portion of Planetary Annihilation forward, then I'll be happy.
If they actually deliver on 50% of what they've promised + Orchestral Score - I'll be beyond happy.
I spent a good portion of 1997/1998 playing Total Annihilation.
However, it is still pretty easy to get a nice milled or extruded aluminium block and call it a prototype so I don't think it will completely eliminate unscrupulous frauds.
Is what kickstarter asking that unreasonable? (other than their lawyers probably told them do this now or suffer consequences that could mean no more business.) If someone can't produce a physical prototype of an item, do they really deserve hundreds of thousands or a million dollars?
Kickstarter is supposed to be a service, for a share of the income they are supposed to facilitate the connection between creators and audience. Rubber stamping an increasingly bureaucratic set of rules is not the way to do this.
A better solution would have been to add the ability for prospective supporters to voice queries and concerns where they could be seen prominently on the page. Right now it seems the creators receive questions and pick the ones they want to answer and place an update answering the questions.
Even better would be to have Kickstarter assess the creators claims on their ability to deliver and assess queries raised by prospective supporters. That would be a real service offering real value, it would also cost real money. Right now Kickstarter's revenue comes from the fact that Kickstarter is popular. The thing that makes creators choose Kickstarter over another platform is almost entirely due to prominence. That cannot be sustained. Eventually it will have to rest on quality of service. The current set of changes do not increase the quality of service.
I can't imagine that will ever happen. If they vetted projects or teams, it would probably put some liability on their shoulders. They are going to do everything they can to prevent that.
That's not true. You can demonstrate prototypes. What you can't do is just whip something up in Blender, do a nice rendering, and then start selling it with with the rewards being "1 widget, 2 widgets, 5 widgets, 10 widgets, 20 widgets", with no indication that you've actually done your homework to say if this is even possible.
They want people to actually have some sort of prototype, something to show for their work, rather than just a slick graphical presentation and reward system that implies that it's far closer to completion than it actually is.
It should be 100% clear that it's just a donation, whether it's $10, $100 or $1000. But you're not getting any product for that donation, until the product launches, when you can go and buy it.