The 2022 Kickstarter Autopsy
Normally, this time of year, I’d do a rundown of what I got from kickstarter in the previous year, what I had expected to arrive and what hadn’t arrived yet. What I’d received and what I thought of them, as a sort of general demonstration of the kinds of projects I’d been backing. It is, in my opinion, a good idea to do this kind of reflection and in my case I want to do it to have a good, reasonable analysis of the kinds of games I’m backing. I can tell myself that I support kickstarter because I want to make sure small industry-excluded voices get a shot, but if I actually mostly just back Reaper minis and the latest We Like It million-dollar plastic-fest, then I’m probably not lining up my self-image and my actual behaviour.
A wrench, however, has been thrown into this project.
Late 2021, Kickstarter, during the flurry of stupid posts from idiots trying to take money from bigger idiots, decided that they would be looking into ways to pivot to the blockchain. This idea was dabbled with, experimented with, teased and tested and cajoled and flirted and then suddenly the CEO of Kickstarter was replaced, and the new one said – to me, personally, on twitter! – no, we’re not doing that. Weird. I’d like a more reliable source than that but whatever.
The thing is, I figured that if I didn’t want kickstarter to do something I should do something to divest of it; I made a point that I was avoiding kickstarter because of their consideration of blockchain and would continue to do so until I had a clear sign that they were going to stop. That means that in 2022, I backed no new kickstarters, and all I got to deal with there were the results of 2021’s kickstarters. What games did I get? What arrived?
And what did I miss, because of this choice to divest?
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