I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Every Kickstarter project is a blatant cash grab, bar none. If you pledge, you're agreeing to pre-order a game that hasn't even begun to be made based on a pitch; if no game emerges, then for all intents and purposes, you'll have no legal recourse to reclaim your payment. You're allowing yourself to be exploited. Waffling about magnitude is intellectually dishonest—the basic principle remains the same in all cases. I do acknowledge that there are varying degrees of coercion inherent to pledge packages, from next to no coercion and limited special rewards on offer (largely seen in obscure games developed by small teams, such as Limit Theory) all the way up to Shroud of the Avatar, requiring large bags of money to secure limited-quantity persistent virtual property and exclusive titles of nobility.
Shroud of the Avatar goes much too far for my tastes (and for most people's, I suspect, which I suppose might be why it's fared comparatively poorly), but you'll never see me spewing vitriol at those who do choose to pledge. I'm simply not going to pledge for or play Shroud of the Avatar, and because I support Star Citizen, it's not my place to judge. Where Grunker et alia go wrong in my mind is in believing they hold the moral high ground because Project Eternity and such "aren't nearly as bad as" Star Citizen. That may be true from a certain point of view, but those are single-player games and thus the developers cannot meaningfully sell virtual property and exclusive vanity collectibles to backers. Being immortalized in a single-player game is about as far as they can push it, and guess what? They all go there, with backer-designed NPCs. statues, monuments, backer-designed items, name in the credits, signed collectors' editions out of many people's price ranges, and so on. How amazing would it be to have been immortalized in Planescape: Torment? If Project Eternity or T:ToN become timeless classics, having an NPC in your likeness in-game will be a great privilege indeed.
Just because your tolerance for Game X's coercive pledge options is lower than mine doesn't mean your hands aren't dirty. "Fuck you, Blaine, you killed twelve people! I only killed three, you're horrible!" That's the essential logic being used here.
"The team fucking sucks, you suck, the game will suck, fuck you" type sentiments are just ridiculous, really. I said my piece once or twice about Molyneux and GODUS (I just don't like his track record, mainly, and also he has AAA industry connections), I said my piece about Shroud of the Avatar and very occasionally bring it up, but I haven't launched a months-long campaign of ridicule against those who did pledge. They're just doing the same thing I'm doing and for the same reasons: Allowing ourselves to be exploited within boundaries we choose for ourselves so that X game will be made that otherwise wouldn't. Molyneux kind of bends even that otherwise fairly solid crowdfunding principle, but whatever. He's not disallowed from using the system, so, so be it.
