[citation][nom]afrospinach[/nom]You are looking at this the wrong way, people don't throw money at kickstarters to get a return like a venture capitalist, they do it because they support the project. Not just anyone can throw up a kickstarter page either, they do have some requirements. The ones that get a tonne of funding are usually established devs looking to break away from publishers, a concept which in itself has a lot of support. Seriously, you should be excited, you don't have to go too far to find rants from fans and devs alike who are exasperated with the industry right now because of publishing deadlines and dlc(or other related nickel and diming schemes), this wrests all that control from them in addition to connecting us to the development process enhancing the probability of getting what we want.[/citation]
No sir, you are the one looking at it the wrong way. To argue that all Kickstarter projects are vetted or carry any promise of success is false. There have been projects that failed to deliver as well as projects that were outright fraudulent (the kid who posted the plagiarized book, for one).
You say that developers and users are frustrated with the actions of the few mega-publishers right now. I won't argue it, but you don't state why crowd-funding is the best solution to independence. Put simply, it isn't (for investors, that is). There are already quite a few VERY well-defined and regulated paths to raising venture capital and selling securities - why on Earth should I get excited about shedding my voting rights, oversight, regulation, etc.? The crowd-funding format is designed around getting folks to make emotional decisions rather than sound financial ones, with the only true beneficiaries being the project starter (free money w/ no true obligations), Amazon (10% cut of all donations), and Kickstarter (another 10% cut).
Seriously, Kickstarter is not good for gamers. It's just another way to extract more money from consumers while delivering less.