Not too long ago, I wrote up the six biggest lessons we’ve seen emerging from the game boom on Kickstarter so far. Ultimately, though, you could tease out one main idea: letting your fans be your publisher isn’t necessarily the golden proposition we all thought it was, it seems.

Development never goes as smoothly as we think it will. Bigger, more expensive projects are notoriously unpredictable, sprouting multiple heads that often start eating each other. I always kind of wished we as consumers and as media were closer to that capricious process, better able to expose or to understand it.

See this article — It sounds absurd that a game can simultaneously be “100 percent finished”, “on time and on budget”  – while also requesting, or requiring, an additional $200,000. I wonder if fans and crowdfunders are going to be as patient and generous about offering the budget deviations, flotation devices and extra time that publishers historically have done sometimes, whether we have transparency on that process or not (we usually don’t).

I mean, in the Kotaku piece I linked above, American McGee seems to think the downside of working with publishers — games pushed out half-done to meet timelines, developers starving to death over a game less successful than anticipated — is worse than the downside of being funded by demanding fans who have more exposure and who want more accountability on the process side than ever before. I’m not so sure.