The Dangers of Beating Your Kickstarter Goal 168
jfruh writes "In March of 2012 legendary game designers Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert ran a Kickstarter to design a new adventure game, asked for $400,000, and came away with more than $3.3 million. Their promised delivery date was October 2012. Now it's July 2013, and the project still needs cash, which they plan to raise by selling an 'early release' version on Steam in January 2014. One possible lesson: radically overshooting your crowdfunding goal can cause you to wildly expand your ambitions, leading to a project that can't be tamed."
Pebble watch is another example (Score:5, Informative)
Originally wanted $100,000 in funding, wound up getting over $10 million. That changed the size of their problem from making 1000 watches, to making 100,000 watches. So now they had to scale their manufacturing by a factor of 100, which is a totally different set of problems to solve.
There has been a lot of angst (some anger) at the delivery delays, most of the "investors" have been reasonably patient, some have been downright ignorant. One of the most popular forum topics is something like "I funded it on [date], why haven't I got my watch", where [date] was only a small number of days after the kickstarter campaign began, but in reality was when they were at over $5 million going up.
Disclaimer: I'm still waiting (patiently) on my two watches. I should have just ordered black, or changed to black when they made the option available. sigh!
Re:There are other dangers (Score:2, Informative)
...You could say that Tim was victim of his own success, but I say he was victim to his own creativity combined with over-excitement.
Sure, one could say that...or one could also say that someone who has been in business long enough to be referred to as "legendary" should at least know the basics of business before making rather large financial guesstimates on general costs. Things like employer taxes and medical insurance plans aren't exactly corporate secrets.
Re:Ah... (Score:3, Informative)
Someone hasn't looked at Civilization V, then.
Civ V was good.
Gods and Kings made it better.
Brave New World (releases in about 4 hours for me) according to reviews is making it even better still.