KickStarter Rant

Posted by MortiS-the-Lost on Feb 05, 2013; 3:45pm
URL: http://the-lost-and-the-damned.71.s1.nabble.com/KickStarter-Rant-tp7579579.html

Don't get me wrong, crowd funding is a good thing - mostly. I'm very much in favour of anything gives people the power to decide what they want and help get it done.
I'm going to be mostly talking about the RPG and table top gaming market here and maybe I'll rant a little and it will go off topic.



It seems to me Kickstarter is to tabletop gaming products what MySpace was to 'indie' music a few years back - it made a few things big early on and now everyone is doing it, and what's more everyone who's doing it is expecting/hoping to get as big as the ones who got big from it early on - which they won't, because everyone else is doing it, thus cutting out any advantage you might have gained from it.
I've supported a couple of Kickstarters and even worked on one - and I've gotten some good stuff out of it. But it's reached a stage now where it's starting to wash over me - 'Will you help share my project on KickStarter?', it this decade's 'Will you listen to my band's demo track on MySpace?'.
And being a creative person I also hear 'You should do a Kickstarter!' from time to time too - ah yes a whole new medium via which people can ignore my ideas (I'm guessing if you were in band during the peak of the MySpace fad you'd have heard 'You should put a demo track on MySpace' equally as often)
Ok here's the thing; the more a medium get used by more people, the less original the things that come out if become.
Open a new tab, goto KickStarter now and search for 'Zombies' - go on, this text will be still be here when you get back - By now you should have an open tab full of page after page of minor variants on an over-used, overrated (and quite frankly these days) boring theme. Zombie films, zombie board-games, zombie T-shirts, computer games, mobile 'apps', books, card games, comic books and oh-look 'indie' bands - many of the projects you'll see have failed to be funded - and rightly so - because there are too many of them. None of these are original ideas, none of them! If you worked on one of these and are reading this, I'm not even sorry - you're not as creative as you'd like to think.  
Here's something I want you all to do before starting a KickStarter for your new idea: search for similar projects, and if more than a few pages worth come up - don't do it! You haven’t latched onto something popular that'll make you money, you're following a trend, a fad and you are not being creative.
Oh don't put words like evolutionary, revolutionary, all-new, next-gen and so on into your description, because chances are your project is not any of them, that's up to other people to decide - which I think is the point of crowd funding in the first place.

PS to all owners of the other crowd-funding sites popping up now because of the popularity of KickStarter - seriously stop it, you are meta-bandwagon-jumping!