What happened to crowdfunding?

It was always retarded. There's no point in donating money into something that you aren't guaranteed to get anything out of. It's not even a real investment. The "return" is that you MIGHT get the video game you paid for.

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Plenty of cool stuff got financed through kickstarter. Sometimes you gotta take that leap of faith (after properly running background check on the project, looking at their goal and how much they're asking for, and what they already produced)

TL:DR, Too many high-profile games ended up either being absolute shite, super disappointing, or just outright cancelled. It's telling that the only Kickstarter game to have any long-lived impact is Undertale.
Surprisingly, board games are more likely to be funded, successful, AND actually good compared to the video games on kickstarter

>the only Kickstarter game to have any long-lived impact is Undertale
and Hollow Knight
and Shovel Knight
and Darkest Dungeon
and FTL
and Banner Saga
and Kingdom Come: Deliverance
and Divinity: Original Sin
and Pathfinder: Kingmaker
and there are probably more I'm forgetting, point is you're a retard.

mighty numbermind

Wonderful 101 is a recent success. Shantae lived up to expectations of people who weren't retarded and knew what they were getting into.

Too many scams/projects that went nowhere

I personally would add Risk of Rain 1 and 2 and also Grim Dawn to that list

The idea was long lived impact, as in people still play or talk about it for a while after it released. Wonderful 101 can't really qualify first because originally it wasn't crowdfunded and secondly the crowdfunded port just came out so that port, the one that was crowdfunded, hasn't had time to have a lasting impact yet.

>Shantae lived up to expectations of people who weren't retarded
I guess but then again I haven't heard anything about it since it came out.

Grim Dawn and Risk of Rain definitely totally forgot they were crowdfunded.

Invested into the MuvLuv Kickstarter and finally got the the Codex that I longed for, for all these years. I'm glad I didnt get burned but gotta say age/ixtl was onboard in the first place so the danger of it being a rip-off were slim.

Also SJW gatekeeping.

people learned first-hand that publishers exist for a reason. without publishers setting firm deadlines and expectations for some of these hacks in the industry, you get star citizen.

Too many scams and mismanaged nightmares like Might No. 9. Very rarely you'll get something awesome like Undertale, Hat in Time, or Deep Rock Galactic, but much more often you'll get a cancellation notice email.

Consumer expectations were far higher than the amount of money they donated could deliver because the true cost of game development is obscene, where even 3 million or 6 million dollars is not enough for anything but a low-mid tier project if the funds are spent extremely smartly (which they often aren't)

its better than nothing

That's a management failure, 3 million dollars is a lot of money. The first thing I'd recommend is to not give money to Californians because then everything costs 10 times as much and they'll hire at least 20 community managers.

3 million dollars is a lot of money to an individual, but not to a medium to large sized business.

Depends on the business, and I would argue that the entry barrier for video game development is not nearly as big.
That's why I said it's a management failure, if you ask for 3 million then don't make a project that requires 50. On top of that I can think of plenty of great games that costed a lot less to make and crowdfunded games are notorious for delays so I think terrible management is a quite plausible explanation.
It's either that or just fraud like Star Citizen.

I can see why you say its a management issue then as its a management problem right from the start when they decide on scope. I was thinking you meant during the project. At the very beginning they overestimate how much they can do with the money and on top of that get pushed towards needing tons of impressive stretch goals to try to get more money but without considering the true cost of those goals.

Planning is responsibility of management, user. Now I don't have any first hand experience developing video games but the step of the process where most projects die is when making the economic analysis, and that is for a very good reason. The people and technology required are usually available but no one has infinite resources, the pertinent corrections have to be done before you start working.

Why finish something when you already got paid for it.

No one has heard of those. My entire fucking family has heard of Undertale.

Broken promises repeatedly then developers defending their inability to achieve their "goals".

There's plenty of success stories, but your money shouldn't be at given to some random people without having any idea why the end product is.

Companies usually fund their projects with debt so that forces them to work in order to pay it back. That's why it's called leverage, because debt forces you to act.
Companies also have other contractual obligations that could get them into legal trouble if left unfulfilled.
But on Kickstarter where funding is reached through donations? Well yeah, you can totally do absolutely nothing, you are 100% unaccountable because of how donations work.