Kickstopper

[Paradoxrifts]

Not only is there no way to prevent a fool from parting with their presumably hard-earned coin, but you don't have the right to second guess their decisions. This is a brand new frontier, but eventually it will settle down into the sort of equilibrium between industry and consumer.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Bob, while I completely agree with your article, I can't tolerate this:

The proof, now, is in the pudding...

The saying is actually "The proof of the pudding is in the eating" The proof is not in the pudding. The mere fact that a pudding exists does not demonstrate its quality or tastiness.

 

[Naqel]

Let's be honest, the industry/industries would find a way to pull the money from people's pockets anyway, so no real harm is done here.

Plus there's always the chance that at some point it backfires spectacularly and we'll all get a good show.

 

[Entitled]

My point was, that someone else is taking the risk, so that someone else should profit from this (the one doing the funding).

There is a good reason in this specific case for paying the producer (I believe they hold the rights to Veronica Mars), but as a general rule, if they give less to the projects than before, why should they earn as much as before?

And what new risk is it that the backers are taking?

That worry would make sense exactly with the small indie Kickstarters, where the backers are taking the risk that the developer can go bankrupt mid-production, or an entirely unproven new developer might not end up with what was promised.

But big businesses and old proven teams doing Kickstarter solves exactly that: We know that Veronica Mars is getting made, and we know that it will be written and acted by the old team that the fans loved.

The worst thing that could happen, would be if it would end up being badly executed, but even then, the backers are the kind of hardcore Veronica Mars fans who would be in the movie theatres on day one anyways, for the sake of watching the ending of the story that they followed for years, and not just reading reviews and contemplating whether it's worth their money.

So really, the only thing that you can bring up against this model is that it allows producers to make money more effectively, not that it takes away extra money from the audience.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Let's be honest, the industry/industries would find a way to pull the money from people's pockets anyway, so no real harm is done here..

That's some rather strange logic. Let's paraphrase: "Let's be honest, criminals will find a way to commit crimes anyway, so there's no real harm done there."

I guess we should just give up on doing anything good, because it's inevitable that things will be corrupted. There's no point in trying to stop any individual criminal act, because we can't possibly stop all crime.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

But big businesses and old proven teams doing Kickstarter solves exactly that: We know that Veronica Mars is getting made, and we know that it will be written and acted by the old team that the fans loved.

No, we don't actually know that.

It's just as likely that Warner Brothers will take the money and produce nothing. There's no obligation that Kickstarter projects actually succeed. If anything, the smaller ones probably have more incentive to succeed, because their personal reputation is on the line. Multi-billion dollar companies can easily brush off any damage to their supposed "reputation" because that means nothing to them.

 

[mdqp]

And what new risk is it that the backers are taking?

That worry would make sense exactly with the small indie Kickstarters, where the backers are taking the risk that the developer can go bankrupt mid-production, or an entirely unproven new developer might not end up with what was promised.

But big businesses and old proven teams doing Kickstarter solves exactly that: We know that Veronica Mars is getting made, and we know that it will be written and acted by the old team that the fans loved.

The worst thing that could happen, would be if it would end up being badly executed, but even then, the backers are the kind of hardcore Veronica Mars fans who would be in the movie theatres on day one anyways, for the sake of watching the ending of the story that they followed for years, and not just reading reviews and contemplating whether it's worth their money.

So really, the only thing that you can bring up against this model is that it allows producers to make money more effectively, not that it takes away extra money from the audience.

I am not worried.

They might take money, try to make the movie, make a terrible movie/or need more money/or CLAIM to need more money to finish it (Kickstarter isn't binding in many situations, for obvious reasons). Being a big producer means nothing, especially since with this kickstarter WB involvement isn't explicitly stated, so they don't even risk getting a bad reputation if anything goes wrong (and even the director/actors involved can safely claim all sorts of reasons as to why they need more money or they were unable to complete the movie).

All of the above reasons to be wary of this had nothing to do with my point, those are general concerns regarding anything to do with crowdfunding.

My point was that if I am the one paying the money, there is no reason why a third party should earn anything from it.

I might be okay giving all the profit to the people I am funding (if I wanted to), but there isn't exactly a good reason to pay the producer, if he doesn't shoulder any risk. As I stated before, it's of course all right if they own the IP, you gotta pay them, but outside of this a producer should be rewarded in proportion to their investment, rather than always taking the same cut.

If two producers were to theoretically fund the creation of a movie, you wouldn't certainly expect having only one of them to earn money from it, right? It doesn't matter if fans also get what they want (the movie), there isn't a good reason why someone makes an investement, and a third party gains from it offering barely nothing to the making of the product.

 

[Entitled]

makes sense what bob is saying. look at what happened with project eternity with obsidian. no publisher would fund what they wanted to make but the moment publishers heard they were going kickstarter they were approached by one. the deal they were offered? do the kick starter, fund and make the project, give almost all the profits to the publisher and in return they would get marketing and retail sales help oh and they had to turn over the IP rights as well.

it IS a system that will be abused by companies and consumers will lap it up

Obsidian had a choice, Rob Thomas didn't because Warner already owned the IP. Ang gaming Kickstarters were already pretty big by the time they tried to fund Eternity, so they had an audience of old-school RPG fans listening to their idea. Veronica Mars is the first $1m+ movie Kickstarter.

Like Dexter111 said above, if anything, this is a huge trojan horse for publishers.

Sure, with the IPs that they they already own, they can continue keeping all the benefits like they used to. But old IPs tend to eventually going to grow old, and they are replaced by new ones, that the publishers proceed to milk as well. But even if Rob Thomas didn't have a choice this time, he will have next time, with a fandom worshipping his every step, with a highly followed twitter account, with the e-mail address of 50.000+ Veronica Mars backers, and with the reputation of a man who can make a decent movie from $3 million, he won't have any obligation for starting new IPs under Warner, and neither will any of his equally famous collegues.

 

[Monsterfurby]

Kickstarter isn't about leveling the playing field. Rather, it's about charging more money to people who find more value from a project.

This is positively the single best description of Kickstarter I have ever read. This needs to be up on their homepage in 150-point-letters. Kudos do you, unpronunciable sir or madam.

 

[Entitled]

It's just as likely that Warner Brothers will take the money and produce nothing. There's no obligation that Kickstarter projects actually succeed.

You are wrong.

This [https://ksr-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/creator-responsibility.png] is in the Terms of Use that project creators have to sign before launching a project, and there is already legal precedent for creators losing a class action lawsuit for fraud after failing to meet it.

If anything, the smaller ones probably have more incentive to succeed, because their personal reputation is on the line. Multi-billion dollar companies can easily brush off any damage to their supposed "reputation" because that means nothing to them.

Yeah, that's why Amazon or Steam sometimes just keeps the money of tens of thousands of people instead of offering a game, or why airlines so commonly tend to keep passangers' money without offering a flight.

Wrong. Even if they could get away with it legally, no business could survive the reputation of not delivering a product or service at all for their consumers payment.

Small Kickstarters can be funded by random anonymous scammers, who don't have any reputation. The big ones have.

Being a big producer means nothing, especially since with this kickstarter WB involvement isn't explicitly stated, so they don't even risk getting a bad reputation if anything goes wrong

Yeah, as if WB could just suddenly decide to deny giving Rob Thomas the money and the IP, and the Internet and it's Veronica Mars fandom would never figure out who was responsible for that.

All of the above reasons to be wary of this had nothing to do with my point, those are general concerns regarding anything to do with crowdfunding.

My point was that if I am the one paying the money, there is no reason why a third party should earn anything from it.

You must be new to this whole "entertainment industry" thing. Publishers earning money on artists' work is how it mainly functions, ever since the Statute of Monopolies in 1624 invented intellectual property, and granted it all to the book printers' guild.

Yes, Kickstarter didn't entirely end this, regarding the old IPs, that are already owned by such publishers. But at least it gives creators a fighting chance, to start new IPs independently from the publishers.

 

[FoolKiller]

Just wait until Activision kickstarts $300 million to make the next COD.

I would love that. Either it would succeed or (hopefully) it would bomb and burn the franchises to ash.

 

[mdqp]

Being a big producer means nothing, especially since with this kickstarter WB involvement isn't explicitly stated, so they don't even risk getting a bad reputation if anything goes wrong

Yeah, as if WB could just suddenly decide to deny giving Rob Thomas the money and the IP, and the Internet and it's Veronica Mars fandom would never figure out who was responsible for that.

All of the above reasons to be wary of this had nothing to do with my point, those are general concerns regarding anything to do with crowdfunding.

My point was that if I am the one paying the money, there is no reason why a third party should earn anything from it.

You must be new to this whole "entertainment industry" thing. Publishers earning money on artists' work is how it mainly functions, ever since the Statute of Monopolies in 1624 invented intellectual property, and granted it all to the book printers' guild.

Yes, Kickstarter didn't entirely end this, regarding the old IPs, that are already owned by such publishers. But at least it gives creators a fighting chance, to start new IPs independently from the publishers.

I wasn't thinking about the denying of the IP, it was more of a "if they would ever try to run a scam, it wouldn't be all that easy to tell the difference between an actual lack of funds and a deliberate attempt at syphoning money". I am not suggesting anyone would actually do it, but it's a possibility, and a big, costly project has a bigger chance of moving the money around. But again, this is more a possible worry with crowdfunding in general, than with big corporations deciding to step in, although I believe the size of a project might affect the possibility to obfuscate the way the budget is employed (at least, that's what I believe could happen).

As I wrote before, I wasn't referring to IPs already owned by companies (of course they will control what happens with them, and earn money for simply allowing the project. We might discuss the fact that I find the current copyright laws simply insane, but that's a completely different matter), but big companies might pressure directors and artists into doing this even for new IPs, while still getting their hands on them, which isn't a great thing in my opinion. Of course there is a good side to it (having less risks would allow them to work on less traditional ideas, without fearing a flop as much), but that's also true for other projects where there isn't a producer involved, so that would benefit them for no good reason.

There are a lot of reasons why a director might do what a producer asks (a promise for a future contract with a bigger budget and a bigger paycheck, for example, but even less "shady" things, it's not like there is a conspiracy behind every corner), even it doesn't benefit their current project or its backers (the crowdfunding guys), and the people funding these projects should probably ask themselves if it's really a good thing to do, should they appear.

It's not like I am saying "we are all doomed! The big fish is going to eat all the small fishes!!!", I am pointing out the fact that shifting the risk on the general public while retaining the same income isn't in the best interest of the consumers.

 

[Entitled]

I wasn't thinking about the denying of the IP, it was more of a "if they would ever try to run a scam, it wouldn't be all that easy to tell the difference between an actual lack of funds and a deliberate attempt at syphoning money". I am not suggesting anyone would actually do it, but it's a possibility, and a big, costly project has a bigger chance of moving the money around. But again, this is more a possible worry with crowdfunding in general, than with big corporations deciding to step in, although I believe the size of a project might affect the possibility to obfuscate the way the budget is employed (at least, that's what I believe could happen).

There are two possible ways the project could not be finished:

#1. Warner misled the production team, and they refuse to let them freely finish the movie from their collected budget. They either syphon away the backer money from them, cancel the whole project, or therwise meddle with the production so that it halts.

#2. Warner allows the team to do whatever they want in good faith, and they run out of money. Warner refuses to help them out with any extra support.

In case of #1, it would take one tweet from a high-level staff member claiming that this is the case, for a huge scandal to start. There is simply no way that any business could survive the reputation of directly taking away consumers' money en masse, and not returning anything for it. It would be treated exactly as if your bank would start refusing to give people back their money that they put in, or if an online store would stop shipping products to paying consumers.

Yes, it would be complicated to legally prove, but it wouldn't need to be proven to begin with. If Ebay would start syphoning away customer money en masse, they could try to deny it and blame it on their sellers, but the fact that people are not getting their deliveries, would make a big enough scandal to seriously harm Ebay.

Big businesses can be greedy, unfair, and generally as customer unfriendly as they can get away with, but simply failing to deliver a paid product would be on an entirely different level from these.

And in the case of #2, like you said, the concerns are the same as with any kikstarter. If anything, the big 1-10 million ones are more safe than the small ones, because people like Rob Thomas have a reputation to protect, and big projects can also beg for some extra investors (in this case support from Warner), while small projects can only silently go bankrupt.

We might discuss the fact that I find the current copyright laws simply insane

Right there with ya, buddy.

but big companies might pressure directors and artists into doing this even for new IPs, while still getting their hands on them, which isn't a great thing in my opinion.

"Pressure them" with what?

They could pressure them to gie up IPs until now, when the publishers were the only source of funding. But Kickstarter is the very reason why publishers can't do that any more.

They tried to do that with Obsidian, and they failed.

It's possible that they will eventually find some producers who are stupid enough to agree with it, but even then, they controlled EVERY IP until now anyways, so for them, the only difference would be that they would be payed earlier.

Kickstarter offers creators a chance to be more independent. just because there is a chance that SOME producers would reject this option, doesn't make it any less revolutionary.

It's not like I am saying "we are all doomed! The big fish is going to eat all the small fishes!!!", I am pointing out the fact that shifting the risk on the general public while retaining the same income isn't in the best interest of the consumers.

And I'm pointing out, that the risk is not just "shifted", but in large part, disappeared.

Neckbeards asking for $10k for a 8-bit platformer, are the "risky" projects.

Just like how before dotcom bubble, the risky online stores were the obscue no-name websites, with surprisingly low prices. After the dotcom bubble, online transactions were made more safe by Ebay, Amazon, and Paypal offering a system that was too big to be a scam.

It is exactly an institutionalized, professional, and large scale system that can make a new business model trustworthy. Corporations that are too big to be just a scam.

Maybe not as big as Warner, I don't think that such megacorporations have a place in the future, but at least big enough that technically they could have spent their own money on the projects, so they are not playing dice with every single project. That is in the interest in the consumers: more active feedback to what gets made, and the only new risk is that the results might suck more than you expected (that was always a risk anyways, when you buya cinema ticket you can't tell for sure whether you will end up liking the movie), not that your money just disappears.

 

[Hitchmeister]

This is not the first Kickstarter like this, where the real goal is not the actual money (because there's financial backing potentially available for that), but to demonstrate consumer interest in a project before a company is willing to invest. Current market research frequently seems wide of the mark. Either saying there's not enough interest in something people clamor for on the internet, or something (say a computer game) being released with controversial features that no one on the consumer side seems to have really wanted (despite the what the developers seem to have thought). So Kickstarter allows an alternative in giving people the opportunity to vote with their wallets about whether they actually want something produced. Now some people feel that this type of research is a misuse on the Kickstarter system because it potentially takes money away from needier projects, bit I think it would be more accepted if there was more transparency about the nature of various projects. Maybe a divide between Funding Kickstarters and Research Kickstarters.

 

[Reeve]

This Veronica Mars film is going to fucking suck. I guarantee it.

 

[mdqp]

Loads and loads of good points.

I believe you are right in most regards, but I still can't help feeling that big companies have proven themselves to be quite uncaring toward the public opinion (I always feel like people have a very short memory when it comes to this kind of scandals), and that they could succeed into twisting around the system. Crowdfunding has still a long way to go, and it still might be unusable for big budget projects (AAA video games titles are beyond the scope of the current crowdfunding system), and some people might be willing to agree being a headfigure for a producer, if it gave them the chance to work later on a bigger, "traditional" project.

Now that I think about it, the problem might be that I am just too paranoid... XD XD XD

Anyway, I am there with you in thinking that crowdfunding is generally a good thing for a lot of artists out there.

 

[Darmani]

Bob is just afraid of industry change. He is use to the studios making the huge decision and the consumers just hoping. What's wrong with consumers having more power over what gets produced?

There's a fine line between the consumer having more power, and the illusion of having power while you're really just getting jerked around.

He touched on that in the article.

Kickstarter is already dominated by crappy stories of exploitation and failure. Just WHERE is the Adventure game that brought this idea to the internet world.

Now imagine where you donate but have not investor rights, established studio holds and are dealing with the kind of people who can make millions vanish in days with no outcoming product. I mean 2 million, even if Bell and the cast took paycuts that would take some real guerilla film making. Moreover the control or satisfaction when you don't have to satisfy your customer, when every ticket is pure profit or their is no authority over the creative type because they got theirs? Nightmarish.

Sorry creative types I kinda view you like farm animals. critical, necessary, majestic, miraculous, and given to not produce to human standard and roll in self indulgent shit without an actual farm structure in place to make it so, milk to eggs or bacon. Yeah this leads to the issues of chicken bacteria but chickens wouldn't just jump healthy into our pots otherwise.

 

[DoctorM]

This Veronica Mars film is going to fucking suck. I guarantee it.

Thank you for your guarantee. I can relax now. (Seriously, that's less sarcastic than it sounds.)

 

[Darmani]

I don't really do kickstarters. But for Firefly... I would probably go, shut up and take my money!

Maybe you should stop and think. I seemed particularly immune to the firefly charm and haven't needed to follow everyone from the thing. Its the internet generation's John Lennanon, likely because that's, metaphorically what it was for piracy is social protest, camwhores are the new geisha, gender roles are dissolved in ability (at technical/electronic stuff) matters and we can be psychic and self aware.

Also post many "return from the dead" shows well I'm appreciative some things are of their time and place even if not objectively faulty. Faimly Guy is my goto. After both returns its humor felt out of step and then I realized why. It stood out and commented on things that were very VERY immediate and contemporary (the deluge of fwapping about Dawson's Creek when it was really sleazy and sensationalist, Just One Fox). A great example is Meg, you was an antithesis of the.. well thing Bob accuses Bell of being part of early 200s was girl power season. Britany, Buffy, Lizzy MacQuire, Jennifer Love Hewitt, and more. They were hot, sexy, pushy, and the world was unfolding for them in defiance of wisdom. Only that didn't last and so after FG's second ressurection Meg is just.. well this dumping hole for negativity as she doesn't have her mirror to parody against. And its not that the FG crew or cast lost their stuff its just Meg is a joke who was out of time and DIDn't like others get to transition to more robust ground.

Firefly is the same way it got to live forever in perfect undercut misunderstood genius cut by the man and we kept telling ourselves this story, ignoring the hundreds of other tv shows facing its restrictions that succeeded or failed and not accept it really REALLY was a shakey and flawed premise thing and Summer Glau and cast haven't gone to career superstardom. It even got a revival movie... was it really good because it sounds to me many a browncoat was.. well satisfied but not happy and it STILL failed.