Reply To: Sad news about 4Ground going into Liquidation

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Yup the comments section of any KS can be pretty venomous at times. Not sure “why” this is, is it the age of the keyboard warrior or just a sense of entitlement?

I suppose these days with so many KS schemes that people DO tend to treat it as a pre-order store and treat any delays/problems as “incompetence” rather than the process of experimentation throwing a spanner into the works (things like the Oculus Rift KS could have folded at many times during their KS and it was touch an go).

Backers need to act like adults, and remember there’s ALWAYS a risk with a KS (or any business decision when running a small company, it’s not just a KS that can give the owner sleepless nights). I had a friend who owned a small company, I found out he had been working for 6 months without drawing a wage from the company (they were living off his wife’s wage) because he didn’t want to fire anybody he had employed (he was more worried about their mortgages than his own). And I think most small business owners are like that, employees become family and friends.

Not reading any of this into the recent news from 4Ground (it was actually a note to backers and not sure it should have been posted as “4Ground in liquidation” in big letters across the forum when it might be just a restructuring, the way it’s been presented could make customers pause before making a purchase, when by the sounds of it you can buy the terrain with no issues and Ben and Family are still trading at shows (which is something you DON’T do if you are winding a company up). Again it’s best to wait and see….

But as a backer of many KS schemes I tend to go for the smaller ones that “try” to create something new (if this is a totally new product, or perhaps getting the ball rolling on someone starting a new company that means I can purchase more of their product later down the road). Too many of these KS schemes ARE operated as a pre-order store (the companies HAVE the money to develop and produce, and indeed have a large marketing budget for the KS itself), but are perhaps there to test the waters to see if the demand is there or not (after all running a KS scheme must be cheaper than employing a traditional market research company to see if there’s demand for your product (although “how” you would do that for Wargaming I’d never know :D)

But thee days KS schemes do have a “dark side”, it’s gone from the optimism of the early days like the first Wargaming KS I backed “Dreadball” where it was “Holy Heck were MAKING sooo much STUFF happen”, to numerous demands, complaints and statements I personally I would expect from a 5 year old in the sense of self entitlement and not any grown adult.

The internet can be a good thing, but it’s also made us all in a sense “keyboard warriors” and people just aren’t as polite using the thing as we used to be (and sometimes this attitude spills into real life situations as well).