[Martin Gantefoehr]

I believe an important part about the whole kickstarter game funding thing is that both sides (artists and funding crowd alike) have to deal with it in a serious, responsible and respectful manner -- even (and especially) when problems arise.

Game development is inherently a high-risk business. It's not at all unlikely that a project will fail, fall behind schedule, run out of budget, not turn out as envisioned, or get abandoned altogether. It happens with publisher-managed projects -- and there's no reason why anything should be different with crowd-funded projects.

There's always a chance that important team members leave the project, get sick, get pregnant, loose faith, burn out. And it's always possible that underestimated creative problems, technical issues, financial trouble, bad scheduling, or plain and simple lack of experience break the project.

Kickstarter is essentially a venture capital platform. You're not pre-odering a game. You're putting money at risk, there's no built-in insurance. The outcome may be the loss of the ventured money, with no refund. It's entirely possible within this framework that somebody sets up a fraudulent campaign and then runs with the money. But I doubt many people who want to seriously work in games will do this. The loss of reputation and trust is too immense to afford, for any artist.

So, yeah. Put your money into the projects of those who you trust. But don't be too harsh on them if things don't work out. Stuff not working out is something that has happend to all of us, I guess -- and I think that's something to remember when it happens to others.