MarsAtlas said:
Yeah, I've always figured that this was kind of obvious. You fly too close to the sun and you crash. Its why I never spent money on any kickstarters that were being severely overfunded, Star Citizen being the most blatant example. If I pay a few bucks more for it at release if its any good than so be it, but I don't wait another year or two for the game I purchased a copy of to become available only to end up disappointing me.
I've found that the secret to not being disappointed by crowd funding is to not give a shit. I've now backed... around 10? projects so far, and almost all of those are still in development. But what I don't do is follow every last dev log or whatever that the project puts out, because game development takes a while, and I would get real impatient real fast. Instead I just check in every 4 or 5 months to see how things are going, and eventually, something will come of it. Or not.
The thing is, I really don't care too much about the result for most of these, because I'm usually not funding that specific project so much as an idea. In Star Citizen's case, I funded because at the time there was a dearth of space sims, and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to help show the industry that the genre was still one with a demand. And that happened. Since the overwhelming success of the SC crowd funding campaign, we've gotten more space games available and many more in the pipeline. At this point, even if Star Citizen were to fail completely, I'd still feel justified in the money I spent(though to be fair, I didn't spend much; some of the more insane contributors might feel otherwise). Hell, I already feel I got my money's worth just in the sheer entertainment factor of getting to see Derek Smart go on another ridiculous rant. I didn't realize how much I missed his trolling.
There're only 3 projects I funded that I actually care about the end project for, all of which I feel fairly confident in. The rest are either like the Star Citizen situation where I was really funding my vote in a neglected genre, or a project that I thought looked kind of neat and was willing to plunk down $10 on. Hell, I've spent more money on games that have sit untouched on my Steam backlog.