[jerf]

"With Kickstarter [Joss Whedon]'d have to give them $500,000 of that, and it's not at all apparent that he would actually need them."

I'm not sure it was possible to pick a worse example. Dr. Horrible is quite possibly the Hollywood project most desperately calling out for fan funding that has ever actually been made, and it was still only made because he just put up the money and hoped for the best. Concrete evidence would suggest that he's not capable of raising millions of dollars from fans without some assistance, because if he could have, he would have then.

Using the Wasteland 2 average donation of call-it-$50 ($47.86), is $500,000 that excessive for coordinating and aggregating the donations of 200,000 people? That's not free. Joss can't avoid paying something for that service. Perhaps someday they'll move to taking a flat fee per donation, though that would also require Amazon and the other payment processors Kickstarter uses to go to flat fees too, which seems unlikely.

[waterlesscloud]

That was 2008, an entirely different time. Crowdfunding barely existed as a concept and to my knowledge it was never Wedon's plan to pursue it.

I'll draw your attention to the fact that the big videogame kickstarters have been for franchises that have been dormant for decades. Surely their principals wanted to bring them back sooner. If they could raise this kind of money, why didn't they do it in 2008? The answer, of course, is that they couldn't do it in 2008. But they can in 2012. And Whedon could in 2012 as well.

[jerf]

Your logic doesn't follow, because "they did in 2012"... with Kickstarter. I don't deny that Whedon could do it in 2012... with Kickstarter.

For that matter he may even be able to do it himself, but my point is and remains that he's going to spend money on the collection and that he's at best only going to do incrementally better than Kickstart prices, not wildly better. And he'll probably have a hard time even doing that well.

[waterlesscloud]

My point is that for big established names Kickstarter doesn't add value, it merely provides a service. One which can (and undoubtedly will) be provided by others.

If they have competition as a service, then they will likely have to compete on price as well.