I am thinking that suing this guy may help deter others from following in his footsteps, but I'm guessing a more knowledgeable person could explain why that would be a bad idea. (Maybe the lawyer expenses wouldn't ultimately be worth it, or the case isn't strong enough...)

The legal costs would be big, but most importantly if the guy is employed and has spent all the money, there is no real point suing him, he'll just go bankrupt.

While attempting to find this information via google, I stumbled upon an awesome project from last year which is nearing completion. A kickstarter was funded to erect a giant statue of Robocop in Detroit.

Check it out!: http://www.avclub.com/articles/detroits-robocop-statue-is-almost-done-and-its-god,97725/

That definitely seems like a worst case scenario for a kickstarter project.

I'm starting to wonder if Kickstarter needs to branch out just a bit to figure out situations like this. For example, maybe people like this one, working with a goal in mind but with no progress at all to begin with should be limited to say 20% past the initial funding goal. People who have a project built but need funding to finalize and release what they have, perhaps get 100% past their initial limit, established companies and businesses get 150%, increase the limit for every subsequent successful funding if they return to Kickstarter. It limits the damage from over-funding and keeps projects a bit more down to earth. Scammers, idiots and struggling successes get subjected to lower percentiles of increased funding or a reduced funding limit, if not outright rejection, but it's a difficult, dangerous and probably unpopular idea.

Still, it's difficult to see Kickstarter fund such wonderful things like FTL, see amazement in a Shadowgate Remake and a Shadowrun Sequel, to be blemished like cases like this, where the website can't do a thing about it, or won't do a thing about it.

Gotta love his "sue me and get nothing" bullshit. Slimeball.

Sounds good in theory and forces devs to actually at least show some form of progress, but would take time and effort on KS's part... we dont want them being too strict do we?.

Well, they apparently do have a staff, but I don't know if they do much of anything outside of picking things that look interesting to be displayed on the front page. And I do know it would be a difficult implementation.

On another note, I'd hate to be any one of the guys who donated over $50 (Which is most of them), though I feel worse off for the $2500 donor. Damn, I wonder how he's taking it.

I'm wondering what the money was spent on since the guys behind the game design have apparently received nothing.

The main risk with projects like these is that people who have no idea about technical risk management are now getting to run them. All it took was a good idea and some screenshots to raise 100k on Kickstarter.

Case in point; the Haunts game that is now in limbo. As a technical person, reading the updates make me cringe. It boils down to "HEEEEELP I DON'T KNOW HOW TO CODE WHY DOESN'T THIS COMPILE HEEEELP MEEEE".

This particular case sounds like the project owner had no idea on how to budget and spend the money, so he just started spending, justifying things like moving to another city as a "long term investment that would benefit the backers". Yeah you can fuck right off, cognitive bias much?

So yeah, back projects like these at your own risk. Personally I have not backed any of the projects that were not launched by a somewhat established developer team that is likely to have competent project management. While I'm sure 98% of the project creators mean well and believe in their idea, I'm also sure that 95% of them are amateurs when it comes to that.

This sounds vaguely like whats happened in DF case :P. But yeah, only downside is, smaller devs might get less backing than they do now because of these issues - people not trusting them.Sad really:/

I would imagine that the only thing that would happen if they implemented this would be as they reached the limit, they would switch to receiving more pledges through Kickstarter-external means (paypal, their own site etc.). Similar to what they do when people miss the kickstarter (or want to change their pledge level afterwards).

My mind goes to some sort of system where the funds are not released in one fell swoop as soon as the goal is reached, but rather released in chunks to progress to the next stage of the project. I can't think of a fully workable system that would achieve this though.

This would mean that they would have to declare these stages and the associated cost to reach it (and people can be leery of them if they don't or they aren't realistic). If they don't deliver? People have the chance to withdraw and kickstarter can pull the plug and refund the money from the unused chunks.

Perhaps when people pledge, they could do so against a specific stage of the project that is the "minimum" they need to see to be confident enough to actually send their money (it would still be taken and held by kickstarter when the pledging finishes though). Then the kickstarter would fail if it either didn't meet its total or one of the stages is underfunded (doesn't have enough specific pledges or cannot be funded by the excess from previous stages).

Hope that made some sense because I didn't get much sleep last night...

Pretty much sums up everything.
Thou shall not donate to blueprints. It never ends up well.

I am sad this happened to board game kickstarter, because it seemed like most of the BG kickstarters were fine (I'm not talking about games' quality, but they were mostly delivered as promised).

If he used money gathered to create the game on his moving to Portland, he scammed all those people on this many dollars.
Well, if he scammed people, he can go to jail, so maybe that would be satisfactory for some. And a good warning for other geniuses who want to use project money to finance god knows what.

worst case....not a surprise. with so much hype about KS founding it was logical that someone would try this...makes one think about possible other projects. you must infest a little time about thinking what would other buy. make a nice
presentation (or let professionals make them for around 2 -5 K) and than you wait and see if your bait is good enough.

KS is a gray zone in terms of the law....what about foreign companies/bakers...would be interesting to see whether a
lawsuit has success or not.

Looks to me like he didn't intend this to be a scam. I think he basically tried to start a publishing business, but had no experience with that and therefore failed.

He still says he intends to refund the money, and that he's going to write a more detailed account. I'll be waiting for that.

Most people don't trust the small, amateur kickstarters. There's tons of projects that never get funded. Try raising $300 having already published material, good luck.

Don't let the success of the game-based kickstarters fool you - there's quite a few of us who genuinely could use the money and are lucky to get 2 pledges in a month. No, I'm not bitter, but keep in mind most of the people you know as "friends" that say they'll do anything to support you actually won't.