This is not a move I consider lightly, for this person has money of mine, and while it is not much, it is still money they took for the delivery of a product that I now believe has no possibility of being delivered. The project in question is Pencil Dice by Ken Whitman and D20 entertainment. I've got a few kickstarters on the hook at the moment and many of them are late, but I have faith in the companies that are dealing with them to deliver the product they promised.
On this occasion, I do not have faith...
There are many of the opinion that those backing KW and his various projects should have checked deeper into the nature of the person they were backing, and certainly, following this, I will be doing, but in the case of many kickstarters that I back, I back them because...
A) I'm at a stage in career and life where I have disposable finance, never had it before and enjoying it while I have it.
B) I like helping people out, and if I can do that by forgoing the cost of my sandwich for dinner, I tend to forgo the sandwich and put the pledge down instead, after all, one less sandwich is probably going to be good for me in the long run :)
However, this is the first time that I've taken the decision to remove something from the "Awaited" list, and it brings in with it a number of quandaries. I'm not grievously wounded by the loss of the $5 that I put down on this one, and cheerfully Expo as a company didn't back the project as we couldn't get a guarantee at the time that the pencils would be delivered in time for the Expo just gone, but I am concerned that having seen the evidence of what Ken Whitman seems to have been up to over the last number of years, that he'll just wait a while and then try to resurface as another entity to continue what appears to be the largest Ponzi scheme in the history of gaming.
It could be that this is all a big mistake and that any day now those pencils will turn up, but the overwhelming evidence appears to suggest otherwise, I'll be the first to make apologies and penance should I be proven wrong, but it's not seeming likely.
What to do...?
And so I wrote this as a signifier of intent, I haven't decided quite what I'm going to do yet, but I think something has to be done, and in that, I suspect I'm not alone. It's one thing to do it once, make a number of grievous errors and not manage to complete the kickstarter, or to find out that project delivery is not the same as envisioning said project, but it's another thing entirely to start projects that you know you cannot/will not deliver to fund other projects that you are more interested in doing.
So...
Something will be done, things like this affect the entire of gaming and indeed the entire of kickstarter and the trust that we place in project creators, which has a knock on effect for all projects...
And that won't do...