When you back a crowdfunded project, you know you are taking a risk.
To a certain extent. It is true that you are investing in something rather than pre-ordering something. What is a problem is when the campaign has misleading information or the funds are used in a way that is not stipulated in the campaign. As an example, in another Tarot deck campaign the designer claimed the images were completely finished and all that was left to be done was to print them. Afterward, it turned out that almost all of the funds were spent on getting designers via Fiverr to create additional work. If backers had known the funds were headed there rather than to pay the printers, there probably would have been fewer backers.
From the two posts made by the Writhing Dark designer it seems like the problem with the funds were:
- They did not adequately calculate the taxes that would be taken out and set the campaign goal too low. This happens a lot but it really shouldn't anymore, when the first few campaigners learned this you would think people would catch on.
- There seems to have been a problem with a shipment of the cards not being delivered from China. That sounds possible and I could believe it if the designer hadn't proven untrustworthy elsewhere (promising people things had been shipped when they had not).
- It seems like the funds from the campaign were used to pay for his family's expenses. I could be misreading that It's reasonable that the entire campaign seems to have been created as an income stream for his family but hey were meant to have the profits, not the money for printing the decks.
Caveat emptor to be sure but it behooves Kickstarter to create and enforce guidelines for creators so that we backers keep on backing and paying Kickstarter their cut of each campaign.