I don’t think I’ve backed any real failures, as of yet. I tend to back projects that sound like they come from someone who knows what they’re doing. So far, I’ve not been ripped off.

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A few projects do stand out as being not all that was promised.

My biggest disappointment is Godus, by British game-development veteran Peter Molyneux and his team. They promised a God Game (an old, established genre, for those who don’t know), but they delivered a mobile-phone-type game based around micropayments, something not even hinted at in the Kickstarter description. I haven’t played in a long while, so perhaps there’s a real game in there now, but I shall have to get around to playing it again before I know.

Frontier Developments’ space game Elite: Dangerous gets a mention for not delivering on the promise of an offline mode. I understand why they did it, I can see what they’ve built and are continuing to build (I play it, it’s a great game for those of us with a good internet connection), but they shouldn’t have made promises they couldn’t keep and they shouldn’t have tried to weasel out of refunding affected crowdfunders afterwards.

I didn’t back their Kickstarters myself, but US developer Double Fine Productions deserves a special mention for abusing both Kickstarter and Steam Early Access by – in my opinion – partially scamming their customers on two separate projects (Broken Age and Spacebase DF-9). I won’t buy from them again.

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On the subject of what crowdfunding is, I don’t think any existing definition describes it adequately: it’s an investment of sorts, it’s a gamble of sorts, it’s a pre-purchase of sorts – all of these are both true and false from different perspectives and none of them give the whole picture.

It’s crowdfunding, something new and comparatively unique. The rules that should exist – but currently don’t – should reflect its special nature.

For larger, more professional and more ambitious projects, I would ideally like to see more done to assure crowdfunders that their money won’t be wasted or stolen. There should be:
• independant, professional assessments of project viability;
• better rules for clearly and exclusively defining projects, goals and progress-milestones – no-one should be making promises they can’t be sure of keeping, or using the absence of certain promises to turn a project into something else;
• minimum standards of communication, so we all know where we stand at any given stage;
• independant monitoring, so we know where our money’s being spent and we can be sure it’s not all vapourware;
• clear definitions of failure, by degrees if necessary, with clear and reasonable procedures for remuneration if some or all goals can’t be met and finally;
• clear rules and standards of enforcement by the fundhost, including pursuing violators and scammers through the courts, where necessary.

For smaller and more amateur projects, which obviously can’t afford those increased operational costs, or any project which is inherently much more of a gamble, there needs to be a very clear distinction that this is the case. No crowdfunding consumer should enter into an agreement uninformed about the risks.

It may be the case that the two kinds of project are best-served with their own, separate services and definitions. Different names for them might be wise. Pro-funding versus Risk-funding, perhaps?

Those are the basic rules, as I think they should exist, at any rate. Until such time as we have something like them, what we have now is summed up perfectly by Ehud Gavron above: whatever we’d like it to become, crowdfunding is currently a gamble. We all proceed at our own risk. 🙂