I think one of the things that keeps people from jumping into Kickstarters is the chance that it might fail. What if they take your money and the game just never happens or you don’t end up liking what you get because it isn’t what you were promised? How do you deal with that end of Kickstarter?

Unfortunately, that’s part of Kickstarter. Kickstarter at it’s heart, is meant to be a crowdfunding platform for someone who has an idea that they want to see come to life. It isn’t meant to be a pre-order system. I’m highlighting that, and I’m going to say it again, Kickstarter is for bringing an idea to life, not for a pre-order. This line has been massively blurred though as there are some companies that are going to do a limited run of a product or want to control their distribution completely and they have used it as a pre-order system. That’s not what Kickstarter at it’s heart is meant for. That doesn’t mean that it was meant to be used that way.

When I look at Kickstarter, I ask myself, is this money that I will hate to lose? Now, I don’t like losing any money, if I had enough money that I didn’t care about losing it, I would personally just fund some of the small Kickstarters just so someone can have their dream happen, but I don’t have that type of money, and you d on’t either. So first ask yourself, is this an amount of money that I’m willing to risk. Now there are some companies, CMON and Awaken Realms are two that come to mind, where it’s not 100% a pre-order system because they do need the money to make the game, possibly, but I am not remotely worried that they won’t fulfill.

When I’m asking myself if I’m willing to lose money, I ask myself based off of some of the criteria that I talked about in the Picking a Campaign article. If it doesn’t hit most of those criteria, I’m worried about it. For example, I backed a game Calico from Flatout Games. I would have been a bit hard pressed to back it because it was their first game, but they had some playthroughs and previews on the page, plus I saw the game at GenCon, because of that, I was willing to put more money into the game than I would have otherwise. And while I haven’t received the game yet, I keep on getting good updates that it’s moving forward, so I was fine putting money into that. Compare that to Third Act Games Satanic Panic. For multiple reasons I didn’t put a lot of money into that, first, it’s an RPG, I can do PDF, so I did PDF. That was going to be a cheaper option, and I can always just print it off. However, do to mismanagement and overextending, that campaign might never fulfill and the person is leaving the RPG community at least for a little bit. Now, they did it to themselves, but because it was a first project for them, or an early project and they hadn’t delivered on one before, I wasn’t as confident that it’d actually get shipped. So I put less money into it, because I was okay losing that money since Kickstarter is an investment in someone’s dream and the hope of getting a return on it.

All of that said, though, it does suck when you don’t get something from it. What recourse do you have? There are some things that can be done, you can take legal action, you can rate poorly the creator, and you can file a complaint with Kickstarter. Let’s talk about the options in escalating order.

You can rate the creator poorly: To do this, they give you an option of satisfied, neutral or not. Click on not, that’ll show up that people have a negative experience with the creator. Plus, you are still able to leave negative comments in the comment section. When venturing into the comments, remember that it’s the internet and comments can be a scary place. So be aware that it might not be the best place to leave feedback, but when you do, leave respectful but fair feedback. Don’t resort to name calling, but don’t hold back from telling the truth. If they aren’t being responsive, if the creator over promised and under delivered, let people know. If what you got was different than what was promised, let people know, that’ll help weed out the bad Kickstarter creators.

File a complaint with Kickstarter: This one is a bit more of a challenge to do. They give you that spot for your feedback, so you can do more than just click a smiley or a frowny face. But Kickstarter isn’t the most responsive for the people who abuse the system. Gold Bell, I won’t go into the details, was a part of way too many Kickstarters before Kickstarter finally banned them. They were abusive, they held products hostage for more money post Kickstarter and they ruined peoples projects. But eventually Kickstarter did ban them, and hopefully that’ll be precedent for the really bad creators and collaborators getting banned in the future, but it might just take a while. With this, again be truthful about it and highlight what has been bad with the kickstarter and why the creator should be looked at. I doubt Kickstarter would ever refund money, it’s already out the door for them at that point, but it’ll help them know who to keep on eye on.

Finally, you can take legal action: This is the trickiest one out of all of them, because it requires more than a few minutes of time and effort on your behalf as well as money. Plus, you need to be able to prove that they were disingenuous with their initial Kickstarter. It could be that they are just really poor and planning and running a business and burned through the money way faster than they thought they would so they aren’t able to deliver on what they promised. That’s not something that’s illegal, it might be bad on their behalf, but not something you can sue about. However, if you can prove that the company is not operating and did not operate their kickstarter in good faith, legal actions are definitely something you could consider.

Now, all of that was scary. Let me put it this way, with 40 kickstarters backed. I’ve given precisely one of them a frowny face from the first option, and I gave negative feedback to Kickstarter on that one as well. 1 in 40 is really good, and I haven’t received the final reward from some of the, but that’s okay. Those don’t get frowny faces because I knew that it might take a while. If you use, again from my Picking a Kickstarter article, the criteria for selecting a Kickstarter, you’re not that apt to get burned on it. And also use the advice from this article. Kickstarter, again, is a crowdfunding site, not a pre-order site, that means that something might fail. Only use the above when the person is not just failing on the business planning side of things, but is actively lying or failing at what they have promised, and again, that was only 1 in 40 for me and even that isn’t remotely close to me considering legal action, this person was just not the business person they thought they were, and then they got scared, and then they failed, that’s all it seems like. Which is a shame, but they did it to themselves, not because of negative or threatening actions from the Kickstarter community.

This was a bit more of a negative article. I would normally ask for some feedback or response, like what negative experience you’ve had on kickstarter, but instead, I want to highlight those that are good. So when thinking about Kickstarters that have maybe had a hiccup in production, what are some shining examples of where Kickstarter creators went above and beyond what they needed to to make sure, even on a tough Kickstarter the backers were taken care of? Let me know in the comments below.

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(this is image free, mainly because I don’t want to assign any Kickstarter with this negative article because it’s been basically positive for me in my Kickstarter experience, and I don’t want to imply t hat any of those are bad.)