You are being peculiarly ignorant of the subject by dissing KS on the basis of credit card only payments and then also dismissing the "hassle" of a refund on a platform that accepts alternative forms of payment some of which require extended amounts of time (from a day to a week) and sometimes even a transaction fee for the handling of a refund. Those wire transfers or money orders aren't instantaneous procedures. In the example of Germany, for instance, it takes days to transfer money from your back account to anywhere and often times, even longer to get that money back. I know first hand how troubling online banking can be. People without credit cards are practically living like internet has never been invented, what with look-up cards with tables for how to process an online order and shit. I'm not even going into PayPal and how they have a penchant for locking accounts that they find suspicious for arbitrary reasons. I remember people who couldn't donate to the Codex fundraisers because their PayPal account didn't let them.
So your personal preference is not an indicator of mesaure regarding the flexibility and the "hassle". All around, like it or not, credit cards are the faster and more flexible form of payment. That's a fact not to be argued against.
I never argued that credit cards > direct debit, etc. They are different forms of payment with their own advantages and disadvantages. So please let's not start a discussion about
that here.
I agree that credit cards are far more flexible, and it would indeed be better if they were more widely spread. Especially in Europe
And it's also true that PayPal is very trigger happy when it comes to things they find suspicious for arbitrary reasons. That might indeed be the actual problem behind the missing love for IGG. By now PayPal agreed to be more acceptable of IGG campaigns, but the reputation damage is already done.
And there is the fact still that KS, despite being credit-card exclusive (even though a lot of projects give at least a PayPal option at their own discretion) is generating several times more funding than IGG despite the latter offering a wider range of payment options.
China has more citizens than the USA, so it must be better to sell stuff there. Wtf? So if a platform has more users and campaigns, it will see a higher amount of funding generated. In total, not necessarily for each project. Also, remember that IGG has a lot of campaigns that are MUCH smaller than those on KS. You can find many campaigns under 2k there. Or do you talk about the 44% success rate vs 34% success rate? As I said, I'm pretty sure that is mostly due to the more bullshit-campaigns that are on IGG.
What a bland and simplistic perspective. That's not how "connections" work and I wouldn't know where to even begin to explain the "concept of making connections", an essential part of any business with more than five employees. At the simplest level, let me remind you that Kickstarter is partnered with Amazon. Let me rephrase that: Amazon has a stake in every KS project on a close, if not equal, level to KS. Now I worry that you might say "so what, why should Amazon, an international multibillion dollar company with vast networks of business and marketing, matter?" but you won't do that, will you? No Codexer can be that stupid.
Oh, wow. Don't worry, I know more than enough of connections, how they work in my field and have more than enough of them
So, enlighten me, how exactly is KS going to use its connections to bring
a single campaign a bigger audience. I'm really curious. I do not see how their "connections" or those of Amazon could bring any single campaign a bigger focus. I certainly never saw ads for campaigns on Amazon.
Yes, KS has a higher hype itself, is constantly covered in other media and this might bring each campaign on the platform a slightly higher focus. But that is not what I would call connections. If you know someone, who knows someone, who can get you a better paid job, special information, a free tv,
that is a connection. I'm really talking about what a platform can do for a single project to make it more successful.
You argue with some pseudo facts on a macro level and completely ignore that this means nothing if you cannot back it up with some actual explanation. So, yes, I'm obviously stupid enough to ask "So what?". Maybe you are able to answer. Because, again, I'm curious.
That was not ever an argument I raised but it is a typical one to make in the latest trend to be anti-KS and hip. Of course not. Shit doesn't happen "just because it's on KS" and to the contrary, people with experience failed as well, which is only natural.
Of course. Yet still people praise KS as if it was some golden cash cow and as if merely being on KS would guarantee anything. You don't, but more than enough do. I think the first argument here was more or less "They are going to have a hard time because they are not on KS". Bullshit! If a campaign fails, it is not because of the platform it is on. This is, if at all, only one factor of many. Well, assuming that the platform itself doesn't just suck. And IGG doesn't. It's less shiny that KS, as correctly stated here somewhere.
Now you are arguing against facts, such as Frontiers having generated enough hits and enthusiasm during IGG campaign while still failing to raise funds, people telling him to switch to KS and once on KS, the project collecting in half a day the amount it did over a month at IGG and furthermore, you are proposing the exact opposite.
Where the heck am I arguing against those facts? What I said was that there is no evidence that the first campaign would have been successful on Kickstarter, as it was an inferior campaign as the Frontiers dev himself said. Maybe it would have worked, but there is no guarantee for that. The actual KS campaign worked so well because it was an improved campaign and the dev had already raised a lot of interest with the former campaign.
There have been enough campaigns that switched from KS to IGG and were funded there (though all of those I know are not games). So I'm certainly not arguing against logic if I claim that the same
could have worked for Frontiers.