My apologies, but this is silly. "You're not funding a game, you're funding the people to make the game" is such an obviously true statement that I don't even know why you're saying it. You still are funding them to reach one goal - make the game. You are not funding them like a tech start-up that has many nebulous technological goals for disparate applications, or that may have a CEO swap that would completely refocus the company into an entirely different industry (Kickstarter even
states their projects aren't allowed to mislead; a CEO swap to refocus a company's objectives would run afoul of the very rules for making a Kickstarter; it's just not an apples to apples comparison, and it may not even be a fruit to vegetable one, either). Hence the "worst offenders"-type
lists you see pop up concerning games.
Ok, you fund my game: Odo's Quest.
Odo's Quest is going to be a Dragon's Dogma spiritual successor in 4k.
I'm developing the game with a bunch of genius fellas and I need 100k.
Ten months later, the 100k and half of my team is gone. I just can't pull this off and in fact I'm going to pass the project to my 17-year-old nephew. Good luck for you all and I'll keep my day job and my normal life.
The money is gone.
The team is gone.
Odo's gone.
The product are not going to come out.
Your ROI will not happen.
In the end, what's the difference between this and an start-up company bad investment?
It's the "nobody's fault" situation. The product aren't going to come out because we can't pull this off, I'm sorry if you've trusted me. It's the same with any enterprise.
Investing in kickstart is not buying a product. You're backing a project that can go wrong. You can't demand success.
...what? Past achievement is the
only metric you have to go by for how reliable someone is. Again, this isn't the stock market; you are not paying an analyst for trends to maximize your ROI. This is Kickstarter; your only "return" is the game (or album, in my case). So unless you have the keys to the DeLorean and some spare plutonium for me and Doc Brown to see exactly how the future is going to go...
There aren't shares but there's the team who is making the product, the way the team manages the project, the costs, etc. Odo's Dragon's Dogma spiritual successor is not only about Odo's past achievements. It's on you to analyse everything that I have now for the project and see if it'll work.
Perhaps a musician released many brilliant albums before, but he did that with studios, labels and producers backing him. It doesn't mean that the artist will make a great album again. Maybe he's now just a depressed, drug user loonie who will just get your money and smoke it all. It's on you to analyse that or if you don't have the means to do this, just don't give him your money.