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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheSword" data-source="post: 8371198" data-attributes="member: 6879661">I think my experience of Kickstarter hasn’t been good. There has been some positives but on the whole pretty negative. Soured by a couple of bad actors.I successfully backed reaper bones 3 and got everything I pledged. It was a pretty huge amount of money, but most of it was speculative and to be honest a lot is still unpainted and boxed even four years on. Was it worth the £400. Maybe when calculated but not practically on a cost benefit analysis for my hobbying over the last four years. That’s on me, but it’s not a great feeling after.Worse was a hardback book of maps product I backed which wasn’t cheap. About £85 for two copies of the book sold on the principle you could lay them side by side. I realized after the production images started to come through that realistically it wasn’t going to be as useful as I thought and I got pretty big buyers remorse. The project was delayed by about 8 months as well and I moved house over that time and massive books became impractical. I tried to get out before fulfillment and the creator said no.Then the big one that I’ve mentioned before was Throne of Night by Gary McBride. That started promisingly and went bad fast, with 80% of rewards unfulfilled and a total ghosting. The investment was £180 so not insignificant, however the feel of being defrauded or tricked was far worse than any financial loss, the frustration, the total inability to get closure, and the anger to see the person still highly active on Kickstarter was quite affecting. I can’t really compare it to any other feeling. The platform themselves have no ethical standards and there is zero accountability. They happily allowed a user to defraud 300+ people and then continued taking their cut of the 400 future kickstarters he went to fun (a pretty unbelievable figure in the circumstances). To be clear, I understand that kickstarters fail, I would understand that. All I wanted was an explanation and proper ownership of that.If it had been just the first two issues I probably would have taken it on the chin and kept my optimism. There are probably a lot of products that seem exciting in principle but don’t quite live up to the hype. Caveat Emptor and all that. The third example though has pretty much killed my enthusiasm for the platform and the principle. I’ll now wait for products, the excitement in the build up just isn’t worth the frustration if it goes bad.If I want to support creatives to build a financial base, I’d rather do it through Patreon, which seems like a far more respectable relationship. The value to my hobby of what I’ve got from the five or six Patreon’s I support is about 500-1000% of what I have paid. Whereas the value to my hobby of what I’ve got back from kickstart is about 5% of what I paid.</blockquote>

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