[Cyberyeti]

 Vampyr, on 2014-March-07, 03:11, said:

So it is giving to charity, except the "charity" goes on to make a profit. LOL

Sort of, but:

There is effectively a binding contract between the company and KS. In the odd cases where a firm has gone bust without producing what they said, in most cases the donors have got their money back, although it can take some time. KS also demanded for us, a gameplay trailer to show that something was in fact going on, this wasn't just hot air.

Our company is unusual in that there is no intention at the moment to go to outside investors, and profit is not the main motive, making enough to keep the game going and fund continued development is the main aim. It also works with an entirely volunteer staff although this will change closer to launch. There is also a tremendous amount of goodwill towards us because of how we came about.

Most people go into kickstarters with their eyes open. They know these are projects that are not suitable for mainstream funding, so people take a punt with money they can afford to lose. In a very high percentage of cases, they get exactly what was promised. When momentum gets behind a project, strange things can happen, some people decided to make an updated version of the old Elite space combat/trading game. They raised more than 2M on KS (having aimed at 500K) and then took the fundraising to their own site, where the total now is nearly 40M. Once our new website is created using some of the KS money, we will look to raise funds there too.

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2014-March-06, 10:45, said:

SpaceX has gotten quite a bit of mainstream press in the past couple of years, I'm surprised you haven't heard of them. It was founded by Elon Musk, one of the founders of PayPal. And it has achieved a number of firsts in commercial spaceflight: first to send a spacecraft to low-Earth orbit and return it, and first to dock with the International Space Station and return to Earth.

In high school my psycology teacher suggested that I do a term paper on Freud. I said who's Freud?
In college some friends asked if I would like to go with them to the Monet exhibit. I said who's Monet?
I have a well-established reputation for being oblivious.

[kenberg]

 barmar, on 2014-March-06, 23:43, said:

I gave to the Kickstarter campaign to make the Veronica Mars movie, which was one of their most successful projects (makes me feel like such a lemming). I think I'm going to get a T-shirt and DVD in return, but I don't really remember. I didn't do it for the gifts, I did it because I thought it was a worthwhile project and it felt "cool" to be part of making it happen. And I also happen to have plenty of disposable income, so it was no big deal to me.

This is largely the way I saw it. The pay-off is seeing the project get done. In your case, Veronica Mars, in my case it would just have been helping some kid do what he wanted to do. The school was to give him a substantial sum if he got the requisite number of investors.

We do online transactions but we directly use a credit card and we are a little wary. There have been some high profile hackings lately, and recently there was a substantial issue with data at the University. They handled it promptly and well, among other things giving everyone a free five year membership in a presumably effective identity protection service. The upshot is that as I looked over KS, which until a week ago I had never heard of, I just wasn't comfortable with it. Probably my error, but I saw no reason I had to use it so I decided not to use it.

Cyberyeti's posts on this are of considerable interest to me and may get me re-thinking it for future events.

[Cyberyeti]

 kenberg, on 2014-March-07, 06:34, said:

This is largely the way I saw it. The pay-off is seeing the project get done. In your case, Veronica Mars, in my case it would just have been helping some kid do what he wanted to do. The school was to give him a substantial sum if he got the requisite number of investors.

We do online transactions but we directly use a credit card and we are a little wary. There have been some high profile hackings lately, and recently there was a substantial issue with data at the University. They handled it promptly and well, among other things giving everyone a free five year membership in a presumably effective identity protection service. The upshot is that as I looked over KS, which until a week ago I had never heard of, I just wasn't comfortable with it. Probably my error, but I saw no reason I had to use it so I decided not to use it.

Cyberyeti's posts on this are of considerable interest to me and may get me re-thinking it for future events.

What we are doing and why, I put in the pet peeve thread http://www.bridgebas...d/page__st__720 (post 721) and this is the background to why we have a feelgood factor in the industry. In that I have to mention Epic particularly (who make the Unreal engine that we're using under licence and have been very helpful), coincidentally one of the ex CoH business people ended up there, not sure if that was a factor.

In the interests of full disclosure, Kickstarter had their own security breach recently, but it was not as serious as most. https://www.kickstar...security-notice I suspect they've beefed up their security now.

[kenberg]

 Cyberyeti, on 2014-March-07, 07:07, said:

What we are doing and why, I put in the pet peeve thread http://www.bridgebas...d/page__st__720 (post 721) and this is the background to why we have a feelgood factor in the industry. In that I have to mention Epic particularly (who make the Unreal engine that we're using under licence and have been very helpful), coincidentally one of the ex CoH business people ended up there, not sure if that was a factor.

In the interests of full disclosure, Kickstarter had their own security breach recently, but it was not as serious as most. https://www.kickstar...security-notice I suspect they've beefed up their security now.

Very interesting. With regard to caution on the internet, I often feel lost in space. So do many. I take your last paragraph as some indication I wasn't being just totally paranoid.

So far, so good for my security. Partly I am a bit cautious, partly, and I think that there is no totally secure way around this, I have been lucky.

I have been thinking I should be able to set up an account with a sum of money in it that is a complete dead end. Something such that if I wanted to put something into, say, Kickstart I could do so with total untraceable anonymity. I don't need a T-shirt, I need anonymity. Probably drug dealeres and politicians know how to do this, I don't.

[Cyberyeti]

 kenberg, on 2014-March-07, 07:26, said:

I have been thinking I should be able to set up an account with a sum of money in it that is a complete dead end. Something such that if I wanted to put something into, say, Kickstart I could do so with total untraceable anonymity. I don't need a T-shirt, I need anonymity. Probably drug dealeres and politicians know how to do this, I don't.

Another interesting phenomenon we hit was with a US based KS and German customers, Apparently according to many people who complained, many young Germans don't have conventional credit cards, they use something else closer to a debit card. This was not usable on a US KS. Paypal also causes problems with KS, as Paypal is understandably reluctant to release the money to KS while any chargeback would be against them, and some projects have been in danger of collapse because the KS succeeded but Paypal wouldn't release the money until the project generated enough adverse publicity for Paypal that they caved in. This combination meant that a number of Germans who wanted to donate couldn't.

[barmar]

 Vampyr, on 2014-March-07, 03:11, said:

So it is giving to charity, except the "charity" goes on to make a profit. LOL

But no tax deduction.

KS is specifically dedicated to creative projects -- you can't use it to collect seed money to start a business. So one way to think of it is like being a "patron of the arts", similar to the way nobility used to retain artists. But instead of individual rich people doing it one at a time, it's done by crowds pooling their money.

[Cyberyeti]

 barmar, on 2014-March-07, 13:50, said:

But no tax deduction.

KS is specifically dedicated to creative projects -- you can't use it to collect seed money to start a business. So one way to think of it is like being a "patron of the arts", similar to the way nobility used to retain artists. But instead of individual rich people doing it one at a time, it's done by crowds pooling their money.

Although of course KS itself takes a cut.

And although it's creative, it's not necessarily artistic, there are some new mechanical devices that get funded through KS too.

[mycroft]

I know that a lot of the original Kickstarters were for "we'd really love to do this, or do this again, right, but we can't put out the cost of it until we know we can get (at least most of) that money back". Steve Jackson's OGRE reprint comes to mind (which went so far over funding that instead of it being a reprint to professional standards, it became a reprint to INCREDIBLE standards).

A lot of what the investors of these things get is "the product" - sure, for maybe more than I would at the local shop when it's released, and without the interest on that money for a year while it's invested, but without the investment the product would never exist. The Veronica Mars movie for instance - it spent years trying to be funded by the usual channels, but nobody would take the chance on the whole cost themselves. But getting 100 000 people putting up an average of $30 is, in very specific cases, easier to get than getting someone to put up $3M. And, if it doesn't fund, nobody's out anything; it's just that the project wasn't in fact of interest to enough to be worth doing, that's all.

[blackshoe]

OGRE is a great game.