Except the “something” they couldn’t make work is not the something they promised to the backers making an investment. That’s the problem here: The Kickstarter

Except the “something” they couldn’t make work is not the something they promised to the backers making an investment. That’s the problem here: The Kickstarter gives the appearance of a simple proposition: Give us $X and we build $Y. If you always needed $X+W money, and always planned to build product Y+Z, and Z sinks the whole thing, then you have misled the original backers. I agree that if they couldn’t make the original Matchstick--the one they promised to their backers--work, they should return what they can. But if the thing that doesn’t work is a business that is a lot more complicated than the thing they put on the Kickstarter, they shouldn’t have been on Kickstarter to begin with.