Help is on the way

[Cyberyeti]

I have been thinking I should be able to set up an account with a sum of money in it that is a complete dead end. Something such that if I wanted to put something into, say, Kickstart I could do so with total untraceable anonymity. I don't need a T-shirt, I need anonymity. Probably drug dealeres and politicians know how to do this, I don't.

 

Another interesting phenomenon we hit was with a US based KS and German customers, Apparently according to many people who complained, many young Germans don't have conventional credit cards, they use something else closer to a debit card. This was not usable on a US KS. Paypal also causes problems with KS, as Paypal is understandably reluctant to release the money to KS while any chargeback would be against them, and some projects have been in danger of collapse because the KS succeeded but Paypal wouldn't release the money until the project generated enough adverse publicity for Paypal that they caved in. This combination meant that a number of Germans who wanted to donate couldn't.

[barmar]

So it is giving to charity, except the "charity" goes on to make a profit. LOL

But no tax deduction.

 

KS is specifically dedicated to creative projects -- you can't use it to collect seed money to start a business. So one way to think of it is like being a "patron of the arts", similar to the way nobility used to retain artists. But instead of individual rich people doing it one at a time, it's done by crowds pooling their money.

[Cyberyeti]

But no tax deduction.

 

KS is specifically dedicated to creative projects -- you can't use it to collect seed money to start a business. So one way to think of it is like being a "patron of the arts", similar to the way nobility used to retain artists. But instead of individual rich people doing it one at a time, it's done by crowds pooling their money.

 

Although of course KS itself takes a cut.

 

And although it's creative, it's not necessarily artistic, there are some new mechanical devices that get funded through KS too.

[mycroft]

I know that a lot of the original Kickstarters were for "we'd really love to do this, or do this again, right, but we can't put out the cost of it until we know we can get (at least most of) that money back". Steve Jackson's OGRE reprint comes to mind (which went so far over funding that instead of it being a reprint to professional standards, it became a reprint to INCREDIBLE standards).

 

A lot of what the investors of these things get is "the product" - sure, for maybe more than I would at the local shop when it's released, and without the interest on that money for a year while it's invested, but without the investment the product would never exist. The Veronica Mars movie for instance - it spent years trying to be funded by the usual channels, but nobody would take the chance on the whole cost themselves. But getting 100 000 people putting up an average of $30 is, in very specific cases, easier to get than getting someone to put up $3M. And, if it doesn't fund, nobody's out anything; it's just that the project wasn't in fact of interest to enough to be worth doing, that's all.

[blackshoe]

OGRE is a great game.