malvasia bianca

Here’s a list of Kickstarters (plus one GoFundMe) I’m waiting for:

One small outlier and one huge outlier. The Urban Tarot guy (“Estimated delivery: Dec 2012”) sends regular updates with new pieces of art, the art continues to look gorgeous, I’m still looking forward to that.

And Hadean Lands was funded long enough ago that the URL in that e-mail no longer works, and that the project doesn’t have an estimated delivery date. (Not sure when Kickstarter added those.) But, from the project page:

If I wanted to take six months and write a game, I could cram that into my spare time. If I wanted to write an iPhone interpreter, I could probably manage that too. That’s not how I want to run this project.

I will quit my day job at the end of December, to work on interactive fiction full-time. That means all my IF-related projects. Most of these are not commercial; they benefit the whole community.

…

Hadean Lands will be my day job — but I’ll be able to keep doing smaller text games in my spare time.

Heh. (And, as the updates have made clear: he’s worked on a lot of stuff other than Hadean Lands in the intervening 3+ years.)

Actually, there’s one other project I backed but haven’t received that’s not on that list: Addicube. I was going to write that that one, at least, was explicit about giving up and acknowledging that it wasn’t going to be delivered, but I actually don’t see an update on its Kickstarter page saying that; pretty sure that Corvus said that openly somewhere else, though. (And Corvus did deliver on Bhaloidam.)

I’ve backed a total of 31 projects on Kickstarter and received 22 of them; and I can think offhand of two non-Kickstarter projects that I’ve backed, one of which I’ve received. Around a third I backed largely because I wanted to support the person involved, and around two thirds I backed as a sort of pre-order; the latter have a solid delivery rate (they slip sometimes, but in my experience they show up eventually, though it possible something weird will happen with some of the ones listed above), while the former are quite a bit iffier on that.

I could (easily!) be wrong, but I get the feeling that people in the “pre-order” category are much better at picking an amount of money that will make a difference to their ability to complete the project, while people in the “support this person” category are asking for money to do something that they’re planning to find a way to do anyways, leading them to lowball the amount of money they’re asking for, to not think hard about the resources they need to complete the project, and/or to spread their interests once they’ve gotten the money.

Which may sound like I’m having second thoughts about backing projects where I want to support the person involved. But I’m not: I’ve already met one of my main goals in those contexts right from the start. So, while at times I’m bemused about how those projects play out, I don’t worry much about them.

And that class of projects usually produces concrete results too, sometimes wonderful ones.