(I preordered one myself).

No, I don't think that's accurate. Things had gone bad long before that, but it wasn't obvious right away that the ship was sinking. That said, going stealth didn't help them one iota but caused a lot of ire.

My experience with ~ 25 KS has been mixed. ~ 4 failed to deliver, more than half delivered successfully. A couple delivered a lousy product. ~ 1/3 are still pending. Almost all of them are late or very very late, especially SW projects seems to drag on forever.

My appetite for KS has cooled a lot and frankly I'm surprised my experience hasn't been worse.

I've had a few bad experiences with KS but as someone whose been using it since very early on, I'm generally pleased with it. KS launched in April 2009 and my first backing was in December 2009. Since then, I've backed 75 projects, 20 of which have yet to deliver, but only 2 which I think will probably fail completely. Most of my pledges are for board games, books, and small gadgets, all of which seem like pretty safe categories.

Around 2009, I had been thinking that the future of music and art might be a return to the patronage system, only with mass audiences funding artists instead of rich individuals. KS, Patreon, and other sites like them seem to have proven that theory out. And I'm happy to see them do so. I still strongly believe that distributed patronage is the best way for artists, musicians, game designers, and even film makers to be able to produce what they and their fans want.

> Around 2009, I had been thinking that the future of music and art might be a return to the patronage system, only with mass audiences funding artists instead of rich individuals. KS, Patreon, and other sites like them seem to have proven that theory out. And I'm happy to see them do so. I still strongly believe that distributed patronage is the best way for artists, musicians, game designers, and even film makers to be able to produce what they and their fans want.

Smart words, 100% agree.

>Almost all of them are late or very very late

To be fair, I have always thought that for many projects the 'expected delivery date' was a joke. When a project explodes and gets 10x the required funding and has either very different logistics problems to solve for hw projects or grows its scope for sw ones, you can't expect the delivery date to be unaffected.

At the very least, your spidey sense should be better tuned to the markers of projects headed for failure, like lack of hard and technical details, too much optimism, etc. I still back hardware projects, but it takes a grown-up, passionate team to move me.

> didn't help them one iota but caused a lot of fire.

Yes, I was referring to the relationship with customers. The result would likely be the same, but it wouldn't end with personal attacks and attempts to uncover a fraud.