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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

When Ouya raised over a million dollars within 24 hours a few weeks ago, they specifically wrote: "In just 24 hours, 20,000 people bought an Ouya console"[0]. They should be more careful with their choice of words in the future if they really want to reflect that "Kickstarter is not a store".

[0] http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/ouyas-big-day

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The change in terminology would seem to imply that Kickstarter is now wising up to the fact that there will inevitably be a high profile failure to deliver in the near future and is now trying to preempt criticism against Kickstarter not laying out clearly enough the risks involved in backing a project.

I welcome this change and think that it will help in the long run.

There's already been a high profile failure to deliver, and it was a software project. Diaspora.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...

Except that Diaspora is alive and delivered on its project.

https://www.joindiaspora.com

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

Didn't deliver on destroying Facebook though, which was (generally) what backers (half-heartedly) hoped for.

Not saying they didn't succeed, just that there are similar lessons about expectations there.

Destroying Facebook was never what they promised. They promised an alternative. What they delivered was in line with the amount of funding they received.

There's a code base that's functional, and available for anyone. The project wasn't a failure. It just didn't take.

Not to mention active, ongoing development, including regularly adding new features and a several hundred thousand strong community. It's not a Facebook-killer, but it's a reasonable social network as-is.

People are used to big software budgets producing nothing.

It's an entirely different value proposition failure when they paid $100 expecting to receive a light bulb or gaming console only to end up empty-handed.

Isn't it the case that kickstarter isn't necessarily a store? Many projects explicitly guarantee that you will receive a certain item, and some are even already manufacturing and selling the items but appear to just be using kickstarter because of its prominence and trendiness.

I'm sure kickstarter isn't liable even for the projects that explicitly promise delivery, so it's still not quite a store in those cases, but I assume that kickstarter doesn't prohibit projects from offering actual preorders.

No.

I think they've been pretty clear about this.

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