Love what Kickstarter is doing for the industry, but I'm not supporting it with my own money.
Well, in theory I loved it as well.
In theory, because after backing 100 campaigns or so, I can tell you most developers have used Kickstarter in a, quite frankly, dishonest way.
Starting with the asking amount. "We need "x" to make a game". No, they do not. They need far more than that. You can't do a game with $20.000,00, with a team of several people. What they usually do is use the campaigns in order to convince some "shadow" big partner to come and fund the rest of the production. Yes, you frequently have teams making deals that are conditional to raising "x" amount on a crowdfunding campaign, as proof of interest in the product. Most of the big campaigns (Bloodstained, Shenmue III, and many others) worked like that.
Then, those bits of exclusive in-game content, locked to ridiculously high asking prices. People complain about big publishers locking exclusive content to certain stores, to certain platforms, to pre-orders. Well, indie developers have been even worse with these practices, and on crowdfunding campaigns this reaches ridiculous levels.
And then, of course, there's the updates. Pretty much all mention how the campaign is a way to follow the progress of the games. The cheaper tiers even usually feature a "receive game updates" bit as a reward. Yeah, right. You get campaign updates during the campaign, but after it ends, backers end up being mostly forgotten. They keep posting updates on social media, or their websites, but backers are left out. You wouldn't believe the number of times I found out about release dates, and whatnot, through forums or twitter, and the developers didn't even bother updating backers about it.
And what about reward delivery? If I had to estimate, I would say in 90% of the cases, I received my copy of the game after it launched, while non-backers could simply go and buy the games, and play sooner than me. In a few cases, I had to wait 2 weeks or so, in order to get a game, when anyone could simply go on Steam, buy it, and play it. In some cases, these games had pre-order bonuses on Steam and similar stores, and even though I backed for a Steam key, I didn't get the pre-order rewards. It's ridiculous, but it's true. In most cases, those "get a copy at a discount over the final price" tiers are a complete joke. Many times, the game launches far below the price the game had on crowdfunding campaigns.
Then, there's the rewards that are never delivered (from in-game content, artbooks, soundtracks, and plenty more). I would say at least 50% of the campaigns, if not more (probably much more), never deliver most rewards.
Yeah, Phoenix Point was my breaking point. And, Shenmue III certainly didn't help.
Now, backing games on crowdfunding campaigns will be a rare exception. I'm done paying to support ingrate people, who then proceed to ignore me, and then either never deliver me the promised rewards, deliver them late, deliver them at far worse prices than launch prices, or simply decide to take Epic's money, and deny me a refund.