Kickstarter - designers too generous?

[FarAway Sooner]

Somewhere in my massive horde of junk I have (or had) a copy of OGRE in the little plastic box. I have not laid eyes on it in several years.

Latecomer.  Some of us still have our copy of Ogre in the original plastic bag, for which we paid a whopping $2.95.  Long live Microgames!!!

[SgtRock]

Take for instance the Warmachine - Tactics kickstarter - now sat at c.£950,000 with a goal of £550,000 - its passed, brilliant and i cant wait for the game BUT.............

why the stretch goals? whilst nice, you had me at 'this is what we want to make and heres a video to show it with some info' that info didnt include 'extra bits' but you still got my money - you got my money because i believed in the core concept and im happy with that - so what if you get £1million, make the game at the estimated 550,000 and bask in the glory of the other 450,000 - please, please dont feel guilty about the extra money, dont add on other stuff noone asked for, bits than could break the game, bits that could extend the programme - just make what you told us you wanted to make - were all happy to pay for that

There was a double fine project that took over 600 percent of its goal and they added so much to it theyve now run out of money and time trying to justify the over subscribed original concept - it doesnt matter

The issue is not just the expanded goals, it's bad management, all the money in world isn't enough if a project isn't well managed. About 95% of failed projects & companies fail due to bad management, doesn't make a difference if it's a new building or a software project. I don't know if anyone tracks kick-starter failures but, about 25% or so of will not deliver a finished project (fail) and about 50% plus will likely deliver something some what less than what was expected. Just look at E3, less than half of the projects announced ever get delivered on scheduled and about 20-25% never get released at all.

[FarAway Sooner]

Yeah.  Those sorts of failure rates in Corporate IT are very well documented and just about as common.

[Arctic Blast]

Oh, what the Hell...

why the stretch goals?

Because without stretch goals, they won't get buyers...they'll get whiners. Seriously. Take a look at any discussion thread of a Kickstarter game on BGG or a gaming site, and you'll see people complaining that the stretch goals aren't good enough. Everyone wants more and more stuff, and then those same people are the first to complain when that extra stuff causes delays.

The issue is not just the expanded goals, it's bad management, all the money in world isn't enough if a project isn't well managed. About 95% of failed projects & companies fail due to bad management, doesn't make a difference if it's a new building or a software project. I don't know if anyone tracks kick-starter failures but, about 25% or so of will not deliver a finished project (fail) and about 50% plus will likely deliver something some what less than what was expected. Just look at E3, less than half of the projects announced ever get delivered on scheduled and about 20-25% never get released at all.

And this is the other part of it. Now you have new developers, or old developers who never previously had to worry about the business side of things, diving in. They don't know what's involved in terms of expenses because they've never run it before. Sure, they're factoring in the costs of an animator...they just aren't remembering that they need to buy him a copy of his animation software first. All of the day-to-day expenses of running a business are new to these guys, and some of them screw it up.

Now add that to the stretch goals. Now you have more moving parts being added to the formula. More time needed working on the extra stuff. More resources spent on delivering them. How many of these guys are properly accounting for the extra work needed to realize those stretch goals? Particularly when they're throwing up more stretch goals in response to people complaining about a lack of them?








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