Rob Wright has a good attitude, there. Any designer worth his or her salt needs to have a thick skin to survive in business.
I think the biggest issue here is Kickstarter itself.
Some of you may remember the early days of eBay. In its infancy, people were getting into the idea of buying and selling the stuff they'd normally put out for a garage sale, and without the need for a face-to-face encounter with a neighbor you'd rather not know. The whole world becomes potential buyers.
Then the scammers moved it. People were sending money to far-flung corners of the world, being promised flat-screen TVs and laptop computers that were either stolen merchandise or just plain didn't exist. It started to reach the point where you never really knew what you were buying and whether or not it was a scam. The public faith in the company plummeted and some market analysts were predicting the company's demise as a result of the passive/ineffective role they were taking in trying to police their own sellers.
They got wise and started creating a safer environment. They bought PayPal, turning it into the number-one method of online payments to retailers and individuals. They started offering Buyer Assurance, practically guaranteeing that if something went wrong with your purchase, you'd get your money back. The company made a big turnaround, the customers returned, and the individual sellers started actually turning their eBay accounts into their primary sources of income in some cases. Some might even argue that the pendulum has swung a little too far in the other direction, allowing buyers to more easily rip off sellers who aren't careful.
Kickstarter, just like eBay in its early years, is a darling of the current dot-com business boom. They're now beginning to experience their growing pains as "successful" projects are beginning to fail at increasing rates, either due to ill-prepared project creators, poor judgment or outright fraud. The place is becoming less and less trustworthy as time goes on, and other companies are stepping up to try taking their slice of the pie, such as Indiegogo and JumpStartCity (which opens next week). EBay isn't the only online auction game in town, but they're the 800-pound gorilla because they went pro-active to protect their investors. Kickstarter, unless they take action soon and learn from eBay's mistakes rather than relive them, will end up being an also-ran.
Simply put, they need to put protections for investors in place to insure they aren't getting ripped off and they need to vet creators to determine if they actually have the wherewithal to get the job done in a timely manner.
Regarding Timothy Niou, if he has college scheduling issues, he should have either given himself a more generous deadline or launched much later than he did. And he SHOULD, right now, face his project's apparent collapse and say something to people.
Adam Clarkson made some judgment errors. He's at least trying to make things right, though he's going about it in an ass-backwards way. It appears as if he's intentionally making it harder to receive a refund in order to be able to say, "I gave them a chance to make a claim, it's not my fault if they didn't." To which I say, in this day and age, bro, that's bullshit, plain and simple. Just issue electronic payments and stop making people who trusted you jump through hoops.
"Altius Management" - he's full of shit from the word "go". They still claim that USPC printed the decks and they just haven't paid for them yet. USPC doesn't even begin printing without money up-front, and they sure as hell aren't going to keep your decks lying around in their warehouse collecting dust.
I'm sure there's a handful of others - I've been tracking more projects that now have past-due delivery dates for the New Deck Report.
And here's the crazy part of all of this - Kickstarter's only allowing the offering of rewards because they're awaiting clearance from the Securities and Exchange Commission to offer COMPANY SHARES. The New York Times reported on this a few months ago. Gee, wouldn't YOU rather have a few shares of Joe Designer's company after he's failed meeting his deadlines, stopped talking to his backers and hasn't delivered a single item for sale? You might be better off simply flushing your cash down the toilet, because at least then you'd know where it was going...
Since we're now looking at an expansion of the market, I'm looking into splitting the Kickstarter projects into a separate topic from the NDR again, and adding new sticky topics for Indiegogo and JumpStartCity. I'm accepting applications for volunteers willing to run those topics for me and keep them regularly up-to-date. I'd only take successful projects and add them to the upcoming releases. A good familiarity with BBcode is a big plus.
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