I've backed the better part of 1,000 crowd-funded projects in the last couple of years and it has been a very mixed experience. I've stuck primarily to video g

I've backed the better part of 1,000 crowd-funded projects in the last couple of years and it has been a very mixed experience. I've stuck primarily to video game content and, of those, many are extremely late. Many have simply stopped responding to or updating backers despite great delays. Some have simply said "sorry, even though we asked for $5k and raised $40k, this is too hard and we quit". There have been more than one of those. There have been some that tried, but majorly screwed up. Like the guys who were making a game, but the engineers wrote it in Google's GO. Then the engineers left and they couldn't find anyone who knew how to make games in GO. Some have been delivered and are either quite broken and/or just completely awful (Takedown: Red Sabre from industry veterans that received a metacritic score of 20/100 comes to mind). There have been a few that have been quite good and many remaining to be completed that look like they could be great. However, I think I am largely done with the crowd-funding experiment and will only be dropping a few bucks here and there for things I truly must see created by people with a reputation. I'm tired of the finished products that are total let downs and, more, I'm tired of the people who just say "oh well, sorry" and don't even finish making the thing they were paid (usually far more than they were asking for) to do. Sure, they are obligated by terms of service to fulfill or refund all rewards for pledges (which means you are obligated to provide your game, if your game was one of the pledge rewards). But in reality, what is anyone going to do to enforce it? Kickstarter sure doesn't give a fuck (hell, they don't even adhere to their own policies, letting people double-dip by running additional crowd-funding sessions for already expired-and-unfulfilled previously funded projects and so on... As much as I delight in the idea of crowd-funding, I think we are headed for a major landslide. Primarily, due to a total lack of enforcement (or vetting) by the crowd-funding platforms. When your entire model is based on trust and reliability and you do little or nothing to protect it, then . . . well, you have nothing.