Kickstarter
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Kickstarter is one of many crowfunding sites where people can throw money at projects or create their own for others to throw money at. The types of projects themselves vary: tabletop games and video games, toys and merchandise, drones and fucking submarines...
Explain?
What's to explain?
If you can picture it, you can advertise it and someone will fund it.
...And sometimes that's sorta the problem.
For every Kickstarter success story, there's at least a handful (if not more) of prolific failures. Not in the "nowhere near its stretch goal" sense of the word, that's just unfortunate if anything.
No, when most people think of Kickstarter failures, they thing of the big projects that gave its backers an expensive ride upon the hype train, as they usually meet their goal a few times over - and before long, mismanagement, delays, and excuses set in for one reason or another. Insights into the project management's ethics (or lack thereof), a changing of hands, and other various factors combine to kill the previously built hype, and the end result is at least one of the following: A) the product never gets released and the backers start demanding refunds, or B) the product makes it out against all odds, but it ultimately becomes a shadow of its former self and a testament to its wasted potential... and the backers start demanding refunds.
- White Wolf and its subsidiary, Onyx Path, have recently funded many of its World of Darkness RPGs via Kickstarter. All of them were met in record time (most of them within a couple of hours, some of them in under just over one hour) with several times the goal met. This results in a large number of stretch goals, many of whom include books that came out a lot later than promised. The worst offender is Wraith: The Oblivion 20th anniversary, which is going to come out in June 2015 and is going to do so for over two years now.
- 7th Sea funded its second edition via Kickstarter in 2015. They raked in a maddening $1,316,813 with 11,483, holding the record for the largest sum and most backers for a single RPG. The initial rules were due in October of 2016, but were instead released in June 2016, four months ahead of schedule. They have been less successful with their sourcebooks, with one being nine months overdue.
- Kingdom Death is a tabletop game with crazy detailed resin miniatures sold at crazy high prices, and most of them are rather lewd. Raking in $12.3 million from under 20k backers, the backer tiers are pretty expensive, with the lowest for their Monster 1.5 set starting at $50. But people still pay because they really like what it brings to the table.
- Mantic Games put two of its wargames on there: the sci-fi Warpath and the fantasy Kings of War, raking in several times the goal to get funded.
- Shieldwolf Miniatures did a Kickstarter to expand their miniature range. Asking but a lowly $5000, they got $20k and used that money to make miniatures that are totally not Warhammer Fantasy inspired and are not meant for proxies in your armies, we swear.
- Shadowrun itself did not use Kickstarter, but the three recent videogames (Returns, Dragonfall, Hong Kong) based on it did successfully.
- Order of the Stick funded the more recent printed volumes of the comic via Kickstarter.