Kickstopper

[Darmani]

Why is this even an issue? These major film studios have been getting into bed with private equity firms for years now, in order to make movies. How is using Kickstarter to raise funds for a movie that different from getting private investors to help fund your movie?

At the end of the day, like any private investment, donating to a Kickstarter is as simple as reminding yourself "never put in more than you can lose". If you can afford to put $500,000 into a hedge fund which is used to finance movies then go for it. If you can afford to lay down $50 for a Kickstarter to make movie, then go for it. The only difference would be in the return you get out of the investment - with the hedge fund/private equity your reward is making money. With the Kickstarter your return is a movie you want to watch.

What happens, my worry, when the money is responsibly spent and no project emerges. How do the inveswtors get their cash back. And these AREN'T financial investments but internet crowd funders who may have pledged for certain things they'll never get because no product. Moreover I'm sure their is more law to project yanking money people don't have to pay out of Kickstarted project head than for masses of I preordered it in 1999 to get their money back. Or having to hire a lawyer to enforce any restitution or punishment.

 

[Naqel]

"Let's be honest, criminals will find a way to commit crimes anyway, so there's no real harm done there."

Taking things to irrational extremes is a poor way of making a point, assuming you had any.
Especially that you compare using an advertising platform to encourage pre-orders, to an act of forcibly taking it away from them.

Not exactly the same thing.

It's not like anyone has to participate in those campaigns, and if you're into something you might as well get your T-shirt to wear while you enjoy it the first time.

 

[Entitled]

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)

Oh, they certainly are uncaring. I just don't think that your point of comparison is accurate for these kind of scandals.

As a rule of thumb, big publishers are not participation in outright scams. Sure, they will overprice everything as far as they can, they will dumb down stories, and put you in prison to protect their IP from your piracy, but these are all on an entirely different level from riding off into the sunset with their consumers' money without delivering any product.

And that's not even just a matter of legality, just as they can avoid accountability on Kickstarter by using a producer as a front, they could do the same in other businesses, collecting your money under a fake identity and then run away with it, but they can't.

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)

I wouldn't be so sure about that, btw. Project Eternity got $4m, from 74k backers, by asking for $20-$25 and getting $54 on average.

And Kickstarter is still rapindly growing, Torment and Veronica Mars are both going to be past that. Now just triple the min. price point, quadraple the audience, and you have $60 games backed by 300k people, paying $90 on average, giving an end result of $27 million. That's more than the budget of Assassin's Creed 1, or Crysis 1.

And 300k potential backers is a conservative estimate, there are millions willing to pay full price eearly for normal preorders. The only difference between that and Kickstarter is a matter of trust, how sure you are that the game will get made.

 

[vid87]

I feel like between this and the awful things Jim Sterling has been describing about the gaming world that we as the consumer are starting to abandon our standards and become more complacent.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

"Let's be honest, criminals will find a way to commit crimes anyway, so there's no real harm done there."

Taking things to irrational extremes is a poor way of making a point, assuming you had any.
Especially that you compare using an advertising platform to encourage pre-orders, to an act of forcibly taking it away from them.

Not exactly the same thing.

What's irrational or extreme about it? Have you ever heard of analogy? That's what I'm using here. I'm not saying that Kickstarter is a criminal enterprise. What I'm saying is the logic that "we can't prevent all of 100% of (X) from happening, so why should we even bother thinking about any single act of (X)" is faulty logic.

Would it help it if I reworded it to more explicitly represent this context? "Let's be honest, some Kickstarter projects will find a way to scam their backers anyway, so there's no real harm done."

 

[Naqel]

Would it help it if I reworded it to more explicitly represent this context? "Let's be honest, some Kickstarter projects will find a way to scam their backers anyway, so there's no real harm done."

Except you're still making the same mistake.

What I say is: People will find a way to cut stuff anyway, so we might as well give them knifes.

What you try to make out of it is: Some people will use the knife wrong, so we should take the knife away from them.

While both statements are true, the one you try to put in my mouth is ridiculous considering nothing illegal or more morally questionable than the usual is going on. It's same old $#!@, just on a new platform.

 

[Entitled]

What's irrational or extreme about it? Have you ever heard of analogy? That's what I'm using here. I'm not saying that Kickstarter is a criminal enterprise. What I'm saying is the logic that "we can't prevent all of 100% of (X) from happening, so why should we even bother thinking about any single act of (X)" is faulty logic.

Your analogy only works on the presumption that the situation that what we have here is, just like crime, worse than the alternative.

Kickstarter is only harmful, if it increases the potential abilities of the industry to grab our money.

So far, in this thread, there was little proof that this is actually happening, just "bad feelings", and negatively worded descriptions of how unpleasant it feels that movies and games are "held at ransom" (in other words, made possible), or that they are too unoriginal (because they are what the fandoms want).

If the worst thing that you can say about it is that publishers are gonna reap the profits, then you haven't said anything that makes it WORSE than how thigs have been done until now.

I guess we should just give up on doing anything good, because it's inevitable that things will be corrupted.

Not anything good, but there are certain good ideals that you should just give up simply because they dont work in real life.

You can stop crime. You can stop scams. You can't stop human nature, or simple logic.

You can't stop the fact that in a free market system, corporations are going to be greedy. Because that's the real complaint here, not any specific harm that is being done, but the general feeling that this usiness model sounds unpleasant.

Well, so does business in general.

 

[Tropico1]

I find all this very patronizing, condescending even. The entire point of Kickstarter is that people are free to decide what to do with their own money. Nobody's forcing anybody to do anything. If a Kickstarter offers bad rewards that aren't worth it to the targeted fanbase, then guess what... people won't back that particular Kickstarter and it will fail. Wow, what a shocking realization.

A studio that is all ready to start production and tries to do a Kickstarter to get even more money before starting production isn't going to frickin CANCEL production because it fails - that is patently absurd, if a project is profitable it will get made regardless, and if it isn't, it won't. There is no "holding for ransom", the investors/publishers either believe the project will make money, or they don't. That's that.

On the consumer side of it, if I want to pay a THOUSAND dollars to see a movie get made, then pay a THOUSAND more dollars to see it in theatres, then pay a THOUSAND more to get the DVD and a THOUSAND more to get the digital download then guess what?? That's my right to decide to do that with my money, and neither Movie Bob nor anyone is anybody to tell me that I can't.

If I want to cash out my life savings and mail them to Time Warner in a big envelope for their execs to take out and rub their naked bodies with it while they laugh at the poor, again guess what - that's my decision to make. Not yours. You are not the savior or the guardian of other people's money, that role does not fall to you.

So in a nutshell.. stop worrying worrying so much about what other people might or might not do with their money... cause it is, in fact, their money, not yours.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

What I say is: People will find a way to cut stuff anyway, so we might as well give them knifes.

What you try to make out of it is: Some people will use the knife wrong, so we should take the knife away from them.

That's an absurd interpretation. What I would say is that we should watch out for the people who knives to stab other people, rather than those who use them to prepare dinner. The big media companies have a history of abusing their power, so, it might be a good idea to keep an eye on how they are using their knives.

Do you think that people who use knives to murder people should not have their knives confiscated and be locked up in prison? Do you think "Oh, they just murdered a few people, let them have their knives?"

 

[Aardvaarkman]

You can stop crime. You can stop scams. You can't stop human nature, or simple logic.

Pray tell, how do we stop 100% of crime and scams? People have been trying for millennia, with little success. If you have the solution to crime, why are you holding back? At the minimum, you would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The fact that you say you can stop those but can't stop human nature is rather weird, because crima and scams are pretty much a part of human nature.

You can't stop the fact that in a free market system, corporations are going to be greedy. Because that's the real complaint here, not any specific harm that is being done, but the general feeling that this usiness model sounds unpleasant.

Kickstarter is not a free market system. It is a system entirely controlled by one company. Kickstarter can arbitrarily ban projects on whatever grounds it feels like. If you think "the real complaint" has anything to do with free markets, then you are absolutely wrong.

Anyway, what's wrong with people complaining about business models that sound unpleasant? You were the one who brought up the idea of free markets - if you believe so much in the idea of free markets, then isn't it equally a part of the free market idea that people should have the right to reject, boycott or complain about businesses and business models they don't like?

 

[Entitled]

Pray tell, how do we stop 100% of crime and scams? People have been trying for millennia, with little success. If you have the solution to crime, why are you holding back? At the minimum, you would be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The fact that you say you can stop those but can't stop human nature is rather weird, because crima and scams are pretty much a part of human nature.

Read your own analogy. You were claiming that we should do something about Kickstarters that you don't like, in the same way as we are doing something about crime with laws.

And that only makes sense, because laws ARE stopping crime. Not the general concept of crime, but at least individual acts of crime.

The same doesn't apply to corporate greed. You might try to boycott greedy corporations, but corporations are greedy by their very nature, so you can't stop corporations from being greedy.

The original sentence is true on it's own, and it doesn't mean that we should allow scams to happen, but that there is no point worrying over a business model just because it's "pulling money from people's pockets", before because that's what businesses do.

Kickstarter is not a free market system. It is a system entirely controlled by one company. Kickstarter can arbitrarily ban projects on whatever grounds it feels like. If you think "the real complaint" has anything to do with free markets, then you are absolutely wrong.

Kickstarter is not a market system period. It's a website owned by a company in a free market system. I was comparing Kickstarter to alternate options.

If there would be a perfectly user-friendly way of funding movies and games, that corporations can't ever use to increase their profits at the expense of the costumer, I would say sure, go ahead, let's ban and boycott and and complain about all other ones. If we would have other tools for cutting things, that can't cut people, then sure, let's ban knives.

But we don't.

Knives are not the worse alternative compared to something else, and that's why we can say that there is "no harm done" by allowing knives.

Anyway, what's wrong with people complaining about business models that sound unpleasant? You were the one who brought up the idea of free markets - if you believe so much in the idea of free markets, then isn't it equally a part of the free market idea that people should have the right to reject, boycott or complain about businesses and business models they don't like?

Yes and if you believe that we should boycott Snickers bars because they are making people fat, others will point out that "people will eat verious kinds of chocolate and candies anyways, so there is no real harm done".

That is, there is no real harm done by Snickers bars themselves, that you could stop with a boycott.

Just because you can imagine a perfect world where everyone is eating 100% healthy, doesn't mean that we should start getting there by boycotting random symptoms.

If you can imagine world where companies are not tryingto pull as much money from us as they can, good for you, but maybe you should be more worried about the worst examples of that, instead of the latest examples.

 

[I am Harbinger]

I can just see it: In a few years, EA will be putting up kickstarters for their games, then selling those games at full price, and even then they'll still be chocked full of always-online drm and in-game transactions, not to mention plenty of half-assed dlc and online passes for those dirty peasants who buy used. Oh, and they'll still have all the same server problems, even if those lovely kickstarters do manage to pony up enough to meet the mark EA said 'might' help them keep it from happening AGAIN.

The saddest part is, I was trying to be sarcastic there, but I honestly can see EA doing all of that...

 

[Entitled]

I can just see it: In a few years, EA will be putting up kickstarters for their games, then selling those games at full price, and even then they'll still be chocked full of always-online drm and in-game transactions, not to mention plenty of half-assed dlc and online passes for those dirty peasants who buy used. Oh, and they'll still have all the same server problems, even if those lovely kickstarters do manage to pony up enough to meet the mark EA said 'might' help them keep it from happening AGAIN.

The saddest part is, I was trying to be sarcastic there, but I honestly can see EA doing all of that...

I would be more worried about that, if EA would have any respected developers or untainted franchises left that can attract the kind of cult following.

What are they going to put up on Kickstarter? Mass Effect is now hated by its own fans, Dead Space turned to generic shooter mediocrity, Sim City is is practically a swear word...

Sure, their games continue to sell, but they sell on a meh-factor, as shiny empty examples of mainstream genericness that the casual consumer tolerates because they are "not that bad".

So far, most Kickstarter successes were coming from beloved franchises, studios, and artists. Even though Veronica Mars did become a cult classic under Warner, Warner kind of deserves this by the virtue of not alienating away the original producers and desecrating the franchise.

That's something that EA can't tell about itself. All the series from EA that a cult fandom would be interested in Kickstarting, are already Kickstarted by their actual original developers, (whom EA has driven away), as "spiritual successors", while EA is busy profiting from their "mainstream appeal".

That's the most exciting change that I hope from Kickstarter: more focus on what elitist audience fandoms want, instead of trying to appeal to everyone.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Read your own analogy. You were claiming that we should do something about Kickstarters that you don't like, in the same way as we are doing something about crime with laws.

Were did I claim that?

I'm of basically the same opinion as Movie Bob - that this just feels kind of wrong. Not that this Kickstarter should be prohibited, but that maybe we should be wary about it.

And that only makes sense, because laws ARE stopping crime. Not the general concept of crime, but at least individual acts of crime.

No, they really aren't doing that. It's only the enforcement of law that has any hope of stopping crime, and even that isn't particularly effective.

The same doesn't apply to corporate greed. You might try to boycott greedy corporations, but corporations are greedy by their very nature, so you can't stop corporations from being greedy.

We absolutely can place limits of corporate greed. That's why things like anti-monopoly and consumer rights laws exist. As greedy as a company might want to be, consumers still have certain rights. As greedy as they might want to be, there are certain things that they are legally prohibited from doing. Again, see previous reply on how enforcement of those laws is imperfect.

Kickstarter is not a market system period. It's a website owned by a company in a free market system. I was comparing Kickstarter to alternate options.

What makes Kickstarter not a market system? It's absolutely a system with customers and suppliers where money changes hands for products and services. And it's a system in which those suppliers compete for the money of customers. Sounds like a classic market to me, much like eBay or Amazon is.

Markets come in all shapes and sizes. Do you not have a local supermarket? That's probably owned by a single private company, even though it's a literal market.

Knives are not the worse alternative compared to something else, and that's why we can say that there is "no harm done" by allowing knives.

This just doesn't make sense at all. We know that harm is done by knives. People are killed with knives, but we allow them because they are useful, and we try to minimise the harm with law and common-sense.

Yes and if you believe that we should boycott Snickers bars because they are making people fat, others will point out that "people will eat verious kinds of chocolate and candies anyways, so there is no real harm done".

And that would make absolutely no sense, because there is obvious harm being done - obesity does cause death and illness.

Just because you can imagine a perfect world where everyone is eating 100% healthy, doesn't mean that we should start getting there by boycotting random symptoms.

When did I say anything about boycotting Kickstarter or anything along those lines?

If you can imagine world where companies are not tryingto pull as much money from us as they can, good for you, but maybe you should be more worried about the worst examples of that, instead of the latest examples.

Can't I be interested in both? It's not that I'm particularly worried about this - again, like Movie Bob, it's just something that seems to violate the spirit of these things. My arguments were mostly in response to yours and others' very odd counter-arguments that we shouldn't really think about these issues, because, Capitalism or something?

I'm more bothered by the strange logical incoherency of your arguments than I am about this Kickstarter.

 

[Entitled]

[on snickers bars]: And that would make absolutely no sense, because there is obvious harm being done - obesity does cause death and illness

I think we are getting to the gist of the disagreement with this analogy.

Basically, I, and (I believe Naqel), are starting with the assumption that even if Kickstarter projects like the Veronica Mars one are driven by greed, don't actually INCREASE the harm caused by greedy corporations, and possibly decrease it compared to other shows that are also driven by greed.

In this sense, it's possible something to both be a tool for causing harm, and at the same time, there being no harm caused by allowing it's existence.

Snickers bars can cause obesity, but if in an alternate world with no Snickers bars, people would be just as obese as here (or even more obese because they eat some worse candy instead), then we can also say that there is "no harm done" by allowing Snickers bars to exist. (there would be other ways to combat obesity, but that would require a much larger scale perspective than just grumbling about a specific chocolate brand).

This is not the same with crime. If we (either legally or morally) discourage murder, or theft, or scams, or monopolies, and this leads to less death and financial ruin and poverty, then allowing them would be actively causing harm.

I think even when used by corporations, Kickstarter is a beneficial force, that has only one disadventage compared to the traditional model, that it is based on earlier payment, but in turn for that, it offers potential to make the industry more fandom-centric, and to make "going indie" in the future easier for corporate artists.

Yes, I've read Bob's complaints about how corporations are using it too greedily, how the resulting works are not innovative enough, etc. I'm just yet to see how it's actually worse, or even as bad as the alternative.

 

[Mayhemski]

It's not suprising that Kickstarter has now got big multi-nationals interested. The marketing potential is huge - and hey it's brilliant people pay to be surveyed (ok maybe overly cynical..).

I honestly though don't know if you can have one rule for one class of project thats allowed because it meets some arbitary rules and another refused for being to big (Mars Kickstarter).

The big effect of this though I think for everyone is the attention it's going to gather for Kickstarter and croiwd funding platforms in gerneral, the tax implications are huge. Many people on crowd funding sites don't consider tax at all. The big projects like this using KS as a marketing and pre-order system are gong to get the attention of the tax man. This isn't an equity investment it's a donation pre-order campaign and thats all potentially taxabale (not just in the USA but world wide as well). It's probably fair to say that so far most projects have avoided this issue as they just aren't big enough to attract attention and well from the authorities position, let the market mature before you tax it.

So for those who are wondering where it might fail this could be where, but also it may well be the thing that keeps big business TM off the platforms.

 

[mdqp]

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)

Oh, they certainly are uncaring. I just don't think that your point of comparison is accurate for these kind of scandals.

As a rule of thumb, big publishers are not participation in outright scams. Sure, they will overprice everything as far as they can, they will dumb down stories, and put you in prison to protect their IP from your piracy, but these are all on an entirely different level from riding off into the sunset with their consumers' money without delivering any product.

And that's not even just a matter of legality, just as they can avoid accountability on Kickstarter by using a producer as a front, they could do the same in other businesses, collecting your money under a fake identity and then run away with it, but they can't.

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)

I wouldn't be so sure about that, btw. Project Eternity got $4m, from 74k backers, by asking for $20-$25 and getting $54 on average.

And Kickstarter is still rapindly growing, Torment and Veronica Mars are both going to be past that. Now just triple the min. price point, quadraple the audience, and you have $60 games backed by 300k people, paying $90 on average, giving an end result of $27 million. That's more than the budget of Assassin's Creed 1, or Crysis 1.

And 300k potential backers is a conservative estimate, there are millions willing to pay full price eearly for normal preorders. The only difference between that and Kickstarter is a matter of trust, how sure you are that the game will get made.

As I said, I am probably a little too paranoid, but you are right, there shouldn't be a risk of a scam in plain sight.

Of course, when you pay before the the product/service has been provided, it's always a matter of trust (and even if pre-ordering hasn't always been the best consumer practice, I see what you mean with that).

Is there a way to know if there is a positive trend in the size and/or the successfulness of the kickstarted projects? There are a few stats on the website, but I can't seem to find some of the information I would be more interested in.

 

[I am Harbinger]

I can just see it: In a few years, EA will be putting up kickstarters for their games, then selling those games at full price, and even then they'll still be chocked full of always-online drm and in-game transactions, not to mention plenty of half-assed dlc and online passes for those dirty peasants who buy used. Oh, and they'll still have all the same server problems, even if those lovely kickstarters do manage to pony up enough to meet the mark EA said 'might' help them keep it from happening AGAIN.

The saddest part is, I was trying to be sarcastic there, but I honestly can see EA doing all of that...

I would be more worried about that, if EA would have any respected developers or untainted franchises left that can attract the kind of cult following.

What are they going to put up on Kickstarter? Mass Effect is now hated by its own fans, Dead Space turned to generic shooter mediocrity, Sim City is is practically a swear word...

Sure, their games continue to sell, but they sell on a meh-factor, as shiny empty examples of mainstream genericness that the casual consumer tolerates because they are "not that bad".

So far, most Kickstarter successes were coming from beloved franchises, studios, and artists. Even though Veronica Mars did become a cult classic under Warner, Warner kind of deserves this by the virtue of not alienating away the original producers and desecrating the franchise.

That's something that EA can't tell about itself. All the series from EA that a cult fandom would be interested in Kickstarting, are already Kickstarted by their actual original developers, (whom EA has driven away), as "spiritual successors", while EA is busy profiting from their "mainstream appeal".

That's the most exciting change that I hope from Kickstarter: more focus on what elitist audience fandoms want, instead of trying to appeal to everyone.

I didn't say it'd work, I'd like to think we as a whole are generally smarter than to fall for that, but to play devil's advocate, let's not forget that EA has a track record of buying up acclaimed IP's (Mass Effect springs to mind) because they can see a buck to be made. And besides, this is EA we're talking about. If there's a dollar to be made, they'll try it. But I agree, I can see the potential that Kickstarter will open the doors for people who want to make a game for the love of the game itself, rather than because it will meet sales figures. I'm just cynical enough to see the worst case outcome as probable.

 

[dubious_wolf]

"Ransom" that's the word I've been looking for, when describing this.
This is a little disturbing. Think if EA gets on this wagon.