Well first off, Kickstarter is NOT a pure donation based system. More often than not you pay a certain amount of money and then get perks based on how much. And part of fulfilling that comes out of the money received, so it's not like donating to a charity or something where all profits go towards a goal. They often still have obligations to fulfill besides just delivering on whatever product has been funded. And often you find that the KS projects that do the worst are ones that don't have perks or have bad ones. If you want some good examples I highly recommend the subreddit shi*ttykickstarters. And the
Secondly, you are being a little critical of the Shenmue 3 KS. Yes, they did things a little ass backwards, but there's more to it than just "A corporation got a bunch of free money to make a game." This video from Super Bunny Hop helps explain things a bit better.
Thirdly, there IS risk in trying to screw over Kickstarter backers. Recently there was an instance where the FTC ruled that a funded project had to refund all their money when it became clear that the owners were not going to deliver. There is also legislation in the works that allows backers to sue bad crowdfunded projects. And there have been other instances where projects have failed to deliver and refunds have been issued, most notably this one recently. Yes there still is some risk that you could give money to a project and then it never gets delivered on and the crook gets away, but the same thing could be said on any sort of investment opportunity.
Having said all that, yeah I think having a crowdfunding platform where you give back a share of the profits is a good thing. Any way to allow for independent projects to see the light of day is good IMO. To be fair I'm not going to necessarily fund those that give back money to backers over regular crowd funding models because sometimes the non-monetary rewards can be pretty cool. Hell, I donated to the Return to Nuke'm High Part 2 KS and I get to have a 30 minute Skype call with the director of the film to talk about whatever I want. I'd rather have that than whatever small pittance I'd likely get monetarily in return.
But again, any way that these smaller studios can get their games out there I'm all for. Still, we have to remember that not all successfully funded Kickstarter campaigns result in success stories.
On a side note thanks for posting that link because it mentioned that the Double Fine Adventure Game video series is done so I can see how it all turned out. The last one ended where they finally finished part 2. Curious to see how they reacted to the feedback.
