Kickstarter 2013 Revisited

[Mark Wieder]

On 05/10/2015 02:56 AM, Richmond wrote:

> Let me pause for a moment to have a few thoughts about the nature of
> contracts:

Without disagreeing with anything else in your thoughtful missive, I'd 
like to point out that Kickstarter is not contract-based. You pledge a 
certain amount of money towards projects you're interested in seeing 
move forward. If that pledge goal is reached within the predetermined 
time frame then your account is charged, otherwise not. The maximum 
value you can request for a project is $20 million, and sadly the only 
unsuccessful project I helped fund didn't reach that amount, thus we 
have no Death Star today.

But your pledge is not a guarantee that a project will succeed, wholly 
or partially. The expectation, of course, is that it will, and the 
pledge reward levels are based on that expectation. The originators of 
Kickstarter projects are under no obligation to produce said rewards, 
and even if they succeed other circumstances may cause unexpected 
delays. As yet not all the Kickstarter projects I've helped fund have 
completed. They may or may not... I see progress on all, some have run 
into scheduling conflicts with publishers, deaths have intervened; as 
with any project, life happens.

The HTML5 pledge drive, on the other hand, was not on Kickstarter, but 
on some other platform (indiegogo? I forget), with different rules and 
different expectations. I didn't follow it that closely, but indiegogo 
is also not contract-based.

-- 
  Mark Wieder
  ahsoftware at gmail.com