[saganus]

I always thought that backers were paying a lower price because in a sense they were bearing a lot more risk than later buyers.

I.e. lots of quirks will be fixed after the kickstarter version precisely because lots of experience is gained after you actually try to produce something at scale.

I agree that in the beginning the original idea could have been for people to be able to buy product X (usually not existing yet) plus some small reward thanking you for your support.

However after a while people started realizing that scaling production for widget X is actually much harder than it looks at first, and since a lot of kickstarters underestimated the challenge they kind of lost the "faith" of the backers.

Could it be then that as a "community" of sorts things evolved such that, since as a backer I know that the amount of failure is high, I expect a heavy discount in exchange for the higher perceived risk and so kickstarters who don't do that just don't get off the ground?

On the other hand, I think Kickstarter suffers from the same problem as Steam's Early Access games: development stagnation over time.

Lots of products I've seen, and even some that I've backed have some kind of app, and so even if you got the hardware piece as expected and you loved it, you still rely on the app being updated at least to fix current bugs but ideally also to introduce missing promised features (if any). But what happens when the kickstarters feel like doing something else now, or just feel like the project ran long enough that they don't want to work on it anymore, it was too stressful/dissapoiting, etc?

So aside from the different opinions on when exactly is a product maker ethically able to be "off the hook" for its creation, in hindsight it seems obvious that there's definitely an "unspoken" risk regarding the kickstarters' commitment, that backers might assume will be indefinite when in reality is usually more limited than even a couple of years.

In the end this causes a feedback loop such that as a creator you need to promise a low pre-order price, which might in turn not be profitable enough to actually deliver the product as promised, causing the backers to feel frustrated when the delivery date doesn't materialize (I've waited 2+ years and even longer for software projects), further causing them to distrust new projects and finally making them demand a very attractive price because it's considered an unsafe bet, which turns into a low pre-order price...

[macspoofing]

>I always thought that backers were paying a lower price because in a sense they were bearing a lot more risk than later buyers

If that's the attitude and that's how backers see themselves, then the backers are just setting up the startup for failure. There's a reason why most startups don't go for debt financing and if they do, it's usually out of desperation.

>I expect a heavy discount in exchange for the higher perceived risk and so kickstarters who don't do that just don't get off the ground?

Sure. That's how payday lenders make their money. Doesn't mean it's good for borrower to use them.

[saganus]

Not sure if I would call it an attitude, but I can certainly understand people that got burned more than once having a lower tolerance for risk. I.e. why should I keep on having faith in Kickstarter projects if they keep failing on me?

The answer could be product/creator fandom or maybe trust in the creator's team ability to successfully deliver something really cool, so a discount is not expected e.g. The Oatmeal seems to have delivered twice IIRC and so backers' confidence in him is high, thus they would probably not blink twice backing a third project even if there's zero discount on it.

But the answer might lie on the other side as well. e.g. Godus' fans loosing faith in a creator due to lack of promises delivered. So if Peter Molyneux launches a kickstarter project again, people would probably just be willing to "bet" very little money (if at all), because you are likely to get nothing, or very little, in return.

How is that unreasonable?