The year in Kickstarter 2013

Well said. I rarely make it all the way through slide shows like this, let alone reach the end wanting more.

referenced link?

There's also a (minority to be sure) group of projects that get close to their goal and pitch in money to make it happen - for example, your goal is $200,000, and you're at $190,000 with 24 hours left.

Now, if you don't get $10,000 in backers in the next 24 hours, you get nothing.

If you can, then you'll get the $200,000.

Do you let that happen organically? Or do you do a last ditch pledge to a friend or family to charge $10K to their credit card, with the promise you'll give it back as soon as your funding clears, and attempt to make do with $190,000, rather than see that plan come so close, only to fade away?

For certain types of projects (like hardware projects), some of the mid-tier rewards are essentially pre-sales. For example, with Pebble, the most popular tier was the $115 watch. People interested in the product, I suspect, are more likely to contribute to the lowest-price deliverable tier rather than the lowest-tier.

Of course, for other projects, there are some high-tier rewards that garner significant interest and skew the average. For example, the Veronica Mars kickstarter had a speaking role as the highest-tier reward.

The median contribution, from what I've seen, sits somewhere in the 50-250 range

I've backed the better part of 1,000 crowd-funded projects in the last couple of years and it has been a very mixed experience.

I've stuck primarily to video game content and, of those, many are extremely late. Many have simply stopped responding to or updating backers despite great delays.

Some have simply said "sorry, even though we asked for $5k and raised $40k, this is too hard and we quit". There have been more than one of those. There have been some that tried, but majorly screwed up. Like the guys who were making a game, but the engineers wrote it in Google's GO. Then the engineers left and they couldn't find anyone who knew how to make games in GO.

Some have been delivered and are either quite broken and/or just completely awful (Takedown: Red Sabre from industry veterans that received a metacritic score of 20/100 comes to mind).

There have been a few that have been quite good and many remaining to be completed that look like they could be great.

However, I think I am largely done with the crowd-funding experiment and will only be dropping a few bucks here and there for things I truly must see created by people with a reputation. I'm tired of the finished products that are total let downs and, more, I'm tired of the people who just say "oh well, sorry" and don't even finish making the thing they were paid (usually far more than they were asking for) to do.

Sure, they are obligated by terms of service to fulfill or refund all rewards for pledges (which means you are obligated to provide your game, if your game was one of the pledge rewards). But in reality, what is anyone going to do to enforce it? Kickstarter sure doesn't give a fuck (hell, they don't even adhere to their own policies, letting people double-dip by running additional crowd-funding sessions for already expired-and-unfulfilled previously funded projects and so on...

As much as I delight in the idea of crowd-funding, I think we are headed for a major landslide. Primarily, due to a total lack of enforcement (or vetting) by the crowd-funding platforms. When your entire model is based on trust and reliability and you do little or nothing to protect it, then . . . well, you have nothing.

Sometimes, it seems like most of the people declaring the Ouya a disaster have never touched one. My son and I play it more than Xbox 360 and Wii U combined. It's a perfect little party console for quirky indie titles.

Ouya has worked great for me and my friends, who play it pretty much anytime there are more than 2 of us hanging around.

Why a disaster?

Same here; Chrome@Mavericks.

If you check the JS console log, you'll see that this is most probably caused by calling the Mixpanel (analytics/tracking script) track method in slideshow.js (line 12), which triggers an error because Mixpanel is not loaded.

Here's the error: 'Uncaught ReferenceError: mixpanel is not defined'.

The chrome extension from getadblock.com? It worked for me on Windows 7 and Chrome 31.0.1650.63 m. My Adblock version is 2.6.

You can buy one today. It went from concept/prototype to full production with the help of kickstarter.

Whether it's any good or not is a separate problem.

Well they don't call it "Kickstarter" for nothing. The point is to bring ideas to reality, not create smashing commercial successes every time.

They got money for it.

I haven't used one, but I was wondering why it had to be blurred and in the corner of the video.

IMO, browsers should require pages to secure permission (with the user having a per-page option to grant permission one time or permanently on a per-origin basis) before playing sound.

Alternatively, it could be designed such that you would expect sound. Probably quiet at first, rather than SUDDENLY NOISE. Surprised me, Kickstarter has been a master of ambient video.

They did list Goldieblox, who are now more known for pissing off Beastie Boys.

None of those are finished yet I think? DFA has its backer release next week, Torment seems to be a long ways away. Dunno about Wasteland as I didn't back that one.

Everything on the list is in past tense; this happened, this got made, this won awards. These are things that HAPPENED because of Kickstarter, not things that are still on their way to happening.

Kickstarter's staff is full of self-embracing hipster narcissists. They don't deserve the success they've had with old school video games. I personally know some of the people involved in these million-dollar campaigns, and Kickstarter has treated them with indifference at best. Real world Karma doesn't come from clicking a DOM element, but real world Karma will be visiting Kickstarter soon. It's already showing in the rise of competitors that would not have stood a chance if a this self-satisfied narcissistic bunch was not in charge of Kickstarter. The trouble with competitors is they don't understand the internal, gamified elements of the backer-base.