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> When you buy on Kickstarter, you aren't preordering. Its a really big elephant being felt by blind men. So... no. One very specific example of a kickstarte
by VLM 11y ago
> When you buy on Kickstarter, you aren't preordering.
Its a really big elephant being felt by blind men. So... no.
One very specific example of a kickstarter that I participated in was a board gaming project by DVG which is roughly their thousandth product shipped and specifically was the 6th expansion to their warfighter game series. In that line of business they have extreme front end expenses for printing and shipping, and in exchange for what boils down to preordering, you get a modest, fair discount.
Sure it as a product didn't exist other than in the minds of the producer and the artist team, but the odds of them failing were approximately zero assuming the economy doesn't implode or DVG himself get hit by a meteor. And there are risks, they have had massive shipping delays. However as you'd expect everything eventually showed up and looked as good as the last five expansions and the base set.
No one in the traditional gaming community found this saga terribly interesting or unusual... Given the lack of surprise, its highly likely that in areas outside this and the area in the article, there are other fields of endeavour that are running a boring pre-order operation.
Seriously, does anyone think anything can stop Jason Scott from directing tech documentaries? It takes forever, but aside from getting hit by a truck, its as sure as anything that "something" will be released sooner or later. I have some money in for the 6502 documentary and I'm just not worried.
Interestingly Amazon offers preorders. I've already pre-ordered cstross's new Laundry Files book which won't be released until mid next year. Nobody talks about amazon pre-orders, but I've done it before with no problem and I've never even heard rumors of a logistical fail. Perhaps the lack of failure makes them too boring to discuss in public. What can you say about Amazon preorders other than they work, which isn't good clickbait, compared to "many or most kickstarter projects crash n burn" which gets the clicks.
- sokoloff 11y agoFor an Amazon pre-order, you risk nothing. You aren't charged until/unless it ships and you get price-protection. Neither of those is true for the crowd-funding world.