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So, you didn’t think backing the Death Star on Kickstarter was worth your hard-earned cash? How about an X-Wing instead? Yes, that’s right, you too can get in at the ground level and help the Rebel Alliance build an X-Wing squadron to take on the might of the Imperial open-source Death Star – only £7 million needed.
Yes, of course this is another joke, but I like it. Unlike the Death Star, they’ve bothered to come up with real goals too, including a whole squadron of the prototype X-Wings, the Millennium Falcon, and even a Y-Bomber.
Again, people are actually putting up money for the thing, and I’m not quite sure what that means. Are there legions of people on Kickstarter that simply hit back on anything just by reading the title? Or are people so enamoured with the joke that they simply can’t help themselves. Either way, I’m assuming they’ll get at least some of their money back, perhaps minus card processing fees. [Kickstarter]
Thanks Paul!
Actually it only gets funded if they reach their funding goal which is pretty high. Although, saying that, if this goes viral they might actually make their goal considering that they had about $70,000 pledged yesterday alone.
“Again, people are actually putting up money for the thing, and I’m not quite sure what that means. Are there legions of people on Kickstarter that simply hit back on anything just by reading the title? Or are people so enamoured with the joke that they simply can’t help themselves. Either way, I’m assuming they’ll get at least some of their money back, perhaps minus card processing fees.”
With Kickstarter, you do not have any money taken from you until the project is fully backed. You can also drop out at any point. Even if it does get funded, the organiser is legally obligated to fulfil their promises and if they fail, to refund the money.
The backers are not in any real risk of losing any money on this project.
Kickstarter is increasingly becoming quite a lot of a joke, and not in a good way, really. They started off in a granola-indie kind of way, funding interesting little projects, but have ballooned into full-blown-venture-capitalists-who-no-longer-give-a-damn.
My one and only foray into Kickstarter involved funding the sequel to Defense Grid. Once its target wasn’t met, the developers released a cut-down expansion pack on Steam….which cost one-third of what I paid to back the actual project.
Never again, Kickstarter. Never again.
ive backed some great projects on there and plan to in the future, but i have to admit i saw a stapler that looked like a whale had exceded its funding target and thought wtf! its a novelty stapler, why is that on here
although i to have backed the Death Star with the hopes of having my name engraved on the bottom of an R2 unit
(oh and @Sam Gibbs – you write for Giz but dont know the basics of how KS works?! takes like 2 seconds research to find out if you dont know, heres a link you may find usefull http://goo.gl/BzQw0)
While I agree Kickstarter has a lot of problems that need fixing I would definitely not say it’s becoming a joke. It is still by far the best way to from prototype to product without having to invest heavily in a product that may or may not sell. Yes the is a lot of crap on there but that doesn’t mean it’s all crap.
It is pushing innovation into the hands of people that would not necessarily have access to funds even if they have the ability to make something and, at it’s most basic level it’s pushing innovation simply into more peoples hands, which is a good thing. It is websites like Kickstarter that allow our ever marching technological expansion to continue at an exponential rate.