2012 might very well end up being the Year of the Kickstarter. Particularly since Double Fine managed to raise in excess of $3.3 million earlier this year, many developers have turned to the crowdfunding site to get the money needed to create their videogame projects. It’s because of Kickstarter that Double Fine Adventure is happening, that a sequel to Wasteland will be a reality, and that the guys responsible for Space Quest are making a new adventure game. But with people being asked to put their money up, typically for a game that is far from done, what level of detail is it reasonable for them to expect from those behind the projects?
Certainly, no one is ever obligated to back a Kickstarter project. A frequent point made in comments on 1UP’s previous Kickstarter-related stories and elsewhere around the web is that some people refuse to support Kickstarter for one reason or another. It’s difficult to blame them. The threat of a successfully backed project not turning out well or outright not being completed continues to loom; we’ve seen how close a project has come to falling apart and, odds are, it will happen sooner or later. There’s also the matter of handing over money, oftentimes in exchange for a copy of the final product, for something that might not be completed for months or years.
