Kickstarter was a mistake.
For every successful Kickstarter there are a thousand where the creators massively fuck over the backers.
I have a friend that sank about a grand into random Kickstarters like 3 years ago. I think he's received one of those items since then.
I've backed hundreds of campaigns and only had about a dozen fail to follow through. A few of those were in retrospect overflowing with red flags, but they were early on and I learned my lesson. The others were genuine attempts but had their own unforeseeable issues. Sometimes shit happens.
It's generally quite easy to identify campaigns that are going to have a lot of trouble, so it's up to you to take the risk or not. Because it is always a risk. But there are degrees, and I mostly avoid riskier ones, unless it's something particularly unique or interesting to me, in which case I'll back at a low amount. Maybe your friend should try the same.
Also maybe stop treating it like a preorder platform. It ain't one. (Unless you're into board games, then you're probably fine, they're all fucking huge these days.)
It IS true, however, that video games are probably the hardest ones to trust in, because video game development in general is already a huge fucking mess, to the point where even long lasting professionals regularly underestimate the time it takes to get things done. It's no surprise indie devs take forever to get shit out and have a lot of problems. There are so many potential points of failure, from coding to music to art to writing to publishing to manufacturing to etc etc etc...
tee ell dee arr Kickstarter is great just don't fall for your own hype and expect more than you should
