Ah, crowd funding. Where people put various projects up on sites such as Kickstarter and people put various amounts of money down so the project can meet its goal. Generally with various tiers. For example a crowd funded video game might offer a digital copy of itself for $10, with other levels of higher donations offering even cool goodies, exclusive contents and more. Of course since your money is funding the project, it will take some time before it comes to fruition and you get what you actually paid for.

     Now I personally dislike paying now for something that I will not receive for some time. When pre-order a video game is literally the day before the games released. Not that this has stopped me from using kickstarter. I myself helped fund one project last year, specifically a Shadowrun video game. Actually I put in roughly a hundred dollars getting me cool things such as: hardcover collection of short stories set in the universe by authors of the genre, a t-shirt, a usb Shadowrun dog tag with a DRM free copy of the game, the sound track and some other things. It is something I funded on a whim last year and it will still be some time before I get my swag. The thing to remember is that you are funding ideas that are not yet products.

     There have been many interesting projects on Kickstarter, some of them getting far more money then they asked for. The 3Doodler is one such example that has three weeks to go is one such example. The product: a hand held 3d printer that works like pen. The goal: $30,000. As of writing: $2,046,564 with 22, 951 backers. And the pledge bonus’s include the pen along with a bunch of the plastic that the 3Doodler uses. This makes this one a rather astounding success.

     Crowdfunding is an interesting way of getting small dream projects the financial backing they need to become a reality. I have not even scratched the surface of crowdfunded content such as this, because I do not wish to write a book on the subject of Kickstarter (which could funnily itself get funded by a kickstarter.) With more indie game developers turning to Kickstarters and a great number of cool projects in the pipeline, this is a part of the internet to keep your eye on.