I love kickstarter. I think it's a great way to fund projects, both gaming and non-gaming. However its popularity for gaming projects has skyrocketed, and this has me concerned.     I do not mind small independent studios making kickstarters, and to a certain extent larger studios with projects that the traditional publisher model won't fund due to their risk averse corporate bean counting. Such as [URL="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/165500047/broken-sword-the-serpents-curse-adventure"]Broken Sword: The Serpent's Curse[/URL].     I have however come to believe some of the bigger development studios are taking advantage of gamers goodwill and enthusiasm for their interests to sidestep the traditional publisher model. Okay, so this is not a bad thing as long as a product is produced right?   What happens in that case is that the people who want the game pay for it in advance (in theory - more on that later) and fund the cost of development that way, then the developer doesn't have to pay back a loan from a publisher, so it's mostly profit for them.   The biggest bonus is that they have nobody interfering with their creative direction by having conversations such as this:      "Tests show that Shooters are popular, let's make it one of them First Person Shooter thingys"   "But this is an adventure game! People point and click on their environment and use objects they have gathered to solve puzzles"   "Yes, that's the spirit! They can point and shoot their environment, with the gun they have picked up! See, it works! Get to work son, this is a moneymaker, and we are footing the bill after all. Oh, and I hear that zombie survival modes are good too, put one in".     The creative freedom kickstarter can make by sidestepping publishers can be a good thing or a bad thing, some developers may need oversight after all to keep them from going too crazy or keep them to a reasonable time frame.   On the whole I'm more in favour of giving creative freedom to people who have proven themselves capable of producing a good game.     Here's where it gets interesting though, donating money towards a kickstarter can create that freedom, and as long as you are getting a product then it is after all in many minds just a pre-order.   The problem is, it's not. A kickstarter donation is exactly that - a donation.   So lets say one of these projects that is successfully funded doesn't actually produce what they promised. Well, you donated that money, kickstarter will not intervene as it is not their problem at that point - and recent PR speak really didn't say anything other than that. You can read it [URL="http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/accountability-on-kickstarter"]here[/URL]. Kickstarter themselves won't be a part of the process.   I wonder how far you will get trying to argue that your donation didn't pay out for you in a legal court.     So, this means when I see publishers put up projects such as [URL="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity?ref=live"]this[/URL] I get concerned. Sure, I want to play this game - but there is no reason they could not have gotten this published the traditional way, and I do not believe their bull$#!&$ about how they tried to do so. I think they either didn't try hard enough, or they just wanted to say they did to make you feel they tried and hence if you don't fund it nobody will. The excuse that this kind of game would not be funded isn't going to fly with me, when there are games like Dragon Age: Origins (the first, not the second) that were a success.   I'd love to play it, and I'd also love to play [URL="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1433901524/numenera-a-new-roleplaying-game-from-monte-cook?ref=users"]this[/URL], but I won't donate to either because I think they could have been done the usual way, and done so without creative interruptions, or very few. I think that the reason they posted their project to kickstarter is to maximize their profits. There is nothing wrong with that in theory, and I'd love to have less creative oversight from people who aren't creative people at all for instance. However I do believe that the high donation numbers for some of these projects encourages more developers to jump on kickstarter for possibly the wrong reasons.   This then creates more high profile kickstarters, and thus more opportunity for a large profile project to fail. As soon as one of these huge projects fails to live up to their promise, I believe it will break the current bubble that has everybody coasting along on feel good vibes. Then, it will be harder for the truly independent projects, or the ones that would not be funded by corporate bean counters to succeed. I think once that trust is broken- it won't be easily regained.   So these are my thoughts on some of the kickstarter projects, and why I won't donate to some of the more high profile ones, depending on whether I believe they would have gotten funding the traditional way, with little creative oversight or not.