Ricky_Bobby: To repeat myself: their purpose is the the same. That was my point, which you missed. Kickstarter, Early Access, and In Development share the same goal of materializing games that otherwise would most likely not exist.

There are no guarantees in buying a supposedly "finished" game; that it will work as it should. 1/5 of the threads on this forum, and on Steam, seem to be about people complaining about things that are wrong with a finished game. There is risk in buying all games, whether it's finished or in Early Access. It's always a gamble.

However, there is no better quality testing that Early-Access, it is significantly more reliable than both in-house testing or 3rd-party professional-testing. Just imagine if No Man's Sky would have been available in Early Access or In Developement, how much trouble the developers and publishers would have saved themselves, and how happier the customers would have been. Early Access reduces the risk of final product failures, especially more serious issues.

It's not difficult to understand why people would want to buy into Early Access:
1) they get the game at a much lower price, sometimes with a ~50% discount as with The Long Dark
2) they get to play and experience the game much earlier
3) they like the games the same developer has made before and want to support their new project
4) they think the idea of the game is cool and/or innovative enough to be worth the risk

These days there is always some Youtube/Twitch-streamer who has played the Early Access game already, in order to attract views, so you are rarely buying into Early Access blindly. You usually have some idea of what the game is.

xSinghx: I've always despised the consumerist mentality that came with Kickstarter's popularity. It's a tool to empower ideas and people that would otherwise go unfunded. Just like any endeavor there's the risk of failure. Adults understand this - children do not.

Yet people (mostly gamers I would generalize to say) treat it as a marketplace in which they make advanced purchases and become upset when they are not rewarded with the object of their materialist desire and even when they are, become vehemently upset with it's failure to conform to the narrowest of margins for their own expectations.

The same people that endlessly bitch about Kickstarter have likely never donated to campaigns that didn't conform to having desirable personal tangible rewards. Campaigns like these for example likely go untouched by them:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/158115638/bring-paris-to-baton-rouge?ref=user_menu
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1033850765/the-tree-project?ref=user_menu

_ChaosFox_: It's a reality of this world - and wholly reasonable - to expect some kind of return on an investment or a "donation", if you will. That return may be something that is quite unexpected - someone might give a homeless guy a few bucks to get themselves back on their feet (something which you should never do, but that's another thing). They might do this to feel good about themselves. They might do this out of a sense of conviction of the need to contribute to making society as a whole better.

But the idea of art patronage with no direct return on investment is a very, very niche one. You have to be emotionally and intellectually invested in the subject matter to an extent that few are to be able to do this.

Food for thought: if Kickstarter had presented itself for what it really was - patronage of an artistic, scientific or intellectual endeavour with no guaranteed reward - would the site have been anything more than an insignificant blip on the wider world wide web? Instead, don't you think that the morally and legally dubious way that Kickstarter and its projects presented themselves as some cross between an investment and a pre-order platform is what made it relevant to gamers in the first place? Would any of them have ever achieved anything near their funding goals if it was widely viewed and accepted as simple art patronage?

lazydog: Kickstarter was never, ever, anything to do with pre-ordering, nor was it a gaming only premise. And please leave politics out of it.

_ChaosFox_: patronage of an artistic, scientific or intellectual endeavour with no guaranteed reward

_ChaosFox_: I never claimed it was. In fact I expressly said it wasn't a pre-ordering platform:

_ChaosFox_: My point is that it was viewed as that and owes a lot of its success to that misconception.

And where on earth did I bring politics to this? Are we politicising the most banal of things nowadays? Is that what the world has come down to?

lazydog: You purposefully brought into this argument analogies about the homeless. God knows why. Leave it out.

_ChaosFox_: OK....so what analogy would you have used? Because I'm at a fucking loss to understand how you went from my comparison about altruism to me supposedly politicising this discussion.

If you can come up with an apt and politics-free analogy, we'll go with that analogy. But I'm sure someone here will get offended whichever you use.

_ChaosFox_: Food for thought: if Kickstarter had presented itself for what it really was - patronage of an artistic, scientific or intellectual endeavour with no guaranteed reward - would the site have been anything more than an insignificant blip on the wider world wide web? Instead, don't you think that the morally and legally dubious way that Kickstarter and its projects presented themselves as some cross between an investment and a pre-order platform is what made it relevant to gamers in the first place? Would any of them have ever achieved anything near their funding goals if it was widely viewed and accepted as simple art patronage?

muntdefems: What? Is Kentucky Route Zero abandoned?

Also, could you please elaborate on Besieged?