The big example of a failed project was a tower defense game? These things are a dime a dozen (when they're not free) - why would anyone throw their money behind maybe getting a new one developed when half the would-be game designers in the world are already writing them for free?
“We reached our $15,000 goal in 3 days, and once you launch a project you can’t cap it. You can only keep it or cancel it. It became a little overwhelming.”
Is there a conflict of interest at work here?
For projects delivering physical goods, the more backers there are the more revenue Kickstarter generates, but the greater the risk of the project not meeting its targets (or goals).
While more orders may mean production discounts and economies of scale, it also means more administrative, support, and other overhead costs that were not factored into the original financial plan.
You can easily create limits on the # of people you allow on each reward tier.
You can also add extra tiers that are identical except for a later delivery date.
Kickstarter should consider making use of # limits mandatory for non-media projects (art, software, film music), or at least more strongly encourage their use.
An additional resource is The Kickback Machine [0], which tracks successful and unsuccessful projects, and CanHeKickIt [1], which graphs funding progress.
Two points that indicate that the author doesn't really know what he's talking about:
1. "Estimating the number of failed projects is difficult because of these tactics, but most independent attempts to pinpoint the figure have landed at 50% or more."
Response: Kickstarter has a statistics page [1] that gives this information. It's not hard to find. And the failure rate is much higher than 50% in most categories.
2. "Retrovirus enjoyed a steady trickle of contributions towards its modest $75,000 goal."
Response: Actually looking at the statistics [2], 75,000 is on the high end for Kickstarter projects (more specifically, it's the 98th percentile for all projects, and the 99.4th percentile for successfully funded projects across all categories; if we look just at games, the percentiles are 93rd overall, and 96.8 for projects that actually made their goal), and carries with it a low funding rate (about 20% overall, slightly less than that for projects in the Games category)
So while it may be a "modest" goal as far as the costs of game development are concerned, it isn't modest for Kickstarter.
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats
[2] currently unpublished data scraped from kickstarter.com; I'm nearly finished writing up my analysis though.
Yes, because it's clear from the context of the article that's what the author meant:
"Kickstarter intentionally makes failure a hard thought to stumble on. Its website does not show failed projects unless they’re specifically asked for and the company directs search engine crawlers away from them."
This statement is only true if one interprets the word "failed" as Kickstarter does, that is, "failed to receive funding."
and
"And what about Kickstarters that succeed? Do they deliver, or is it just the beginning of a path full of challenges?"
This statement wouldn't make sense if the author meant "successful delivery" when he said "success."
I found the wording of the title ambiguous. I assumed this would be about projects that meet their funding goal but fail to materialize, rather than projects that fail to meet their funding goal in the first place.
Kickstarter has always used "success" and "failure" to refer to the fundraising effort, not the deliverables. So the title was at least consistent with that usage.
It actually uses 'funded' or 'funding unsuccessful', not failure. To me, failure says 'funding successful but failure to deliver product (by a set time/at all).
Personally I'm more than a little annoyed at their journal-type "quotes", especially because they put the quote directly under the paragraph they just quoted, so you're basically just reading the exact same sentence twice, one after the other. And they do this 9 times. It's just... horrible.
