Yeah but now I can back a Kickstarter and pay $60 for it and another $15 in shipping or wait for Miniature Market to get it and pay $40 and $5 for shipping. The issue isn’t that shipping and book costs have gone up it’s that I assume all the risk and pay 30% more (as an example) . A couple years ago projects seemed to do a better job of offering a benefit to backing like the KP example I noted in the first post. Some sort of discount off MSRP etc.
My big issue with your perspective here isn't anything to do with you, but an observation on the last 10 years.
It used to be that Kickstarters, especially for RPGs, were known to be for indies. However, a lot of businesses have gotten involved. As a result, they've made it so a lot of backers now expect Kickstarter to work like a pre-order store. In reality, most Kickstarters, especially for RPGs, are passion projects that aren't feasible to be made without the help of backers.
Let me use my own projects as an example. I have three Kickstarters completed. Two of them were late -- one due to covid, one due to design issues. The other Kickstarter was early. In all of these cases, there is no way I could have ever assumed the financial risk by myself of printing, shipping, and distributing my ideas. However, through Kickstarter, I found other people willing to risk it to see my vision realized, because they believed in my vision.
With your perspective, the reality of the human on the other side of the Kickstarter doesn't matter. This is because businesses like Free League, MCDM, Darrington Press, etc, don't usually usually need the backers to take on as much risk. For these projects, it makes sense that you'd be miffed about risking anything, since they are legit businesses.
But again, Kickstarter isn't just for established organizations. It's for anyone, and more importantly, its for people who cannot get financial backing through other means. I'm not rich or well-connected enough attract investors through means beyond crowdfunding.
I get that it can suck being burned on Kickstarter. Not only have I been burned, but the wait times for some of my projects have burned others too. But
for myself, I personally am OK being burned if I really thought it might be a cool project when realized. Now, if others who get burned disagree, that's fine. But that's part of the beauty of Kickstarter in my eyes.
Overall, I'm not sending this to challenge your perspective, but more so to point out how your perspective completely discounts the people on the other side of the table. You're risking maybe 70 dollars, and I'm risking the entirety of my reputation, my resources, and my time in trying to create this thing.
A lot of people in this thread have an attitude of looking at who is running the KS before backing. I think that's fair. But overtime, this attitude (which is logical in addition to being fair), as well as the presence of larger actors in the scene, really steps on the indie scene. Now that people are used to big companies dropping PDFs at the jump without having ever had to have paid for art or layout, people like me have to try even harder to convince people to take a dare on my projects. IT sucks, because it makes a smaller creator feel like unless they're a big company, they have no business on a platform originally created to help them.
As for discounts and pricing, I can't undersell just how expensive things have become on the publishing side. My first KS book was quoted at an 8K USD print run. Due to Covid, that doubled. On top of that, customs and shipping to our distributor increased something like x10 over. And then actually sending the books to our backers cost several times over as well.
If every step of production costs the publisher anywhere from x2 to x10 more, then there simply isn't room for discounts like there used to be. Because otherwise, these projects can't even afford to be printed at all.
