Two points that indicate that the author doesn't really know what he's talking about:
1. "Estimating the number of failed projects is difficult because of these tactics, but most independent attempts to pinpoint the figure have landed at 50% or more."
Response: Kickstarter has a statistics page [1] that gives this information. It's not hard to find. And the failure rate is much higher than 50% in most categories.
2. "Retrovirus enjoyed a steady trickle of contributions towards its modest $75,000 goal."
Response: Actually looking at the statistics [2], 75,000 is on the high end for Kickstarter projects (more specifically, it's the 98th percentile for all projects, and the 99.4th percentile for successfully funded projects across all categories; if we look just at games, the percentiles are 93rd overall, and 96.8 for projects that actually made their goal), and carries with it a low funding rate (about 20% overall, slightly less than that for projects in the Games category)
So while it may be a "modest" goal as far as the costs of game development are concerned, it isn't modest for Kickstarter.
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats
[2] currently unpublished data scraped from kickstarter.com; I'm nearly finished writing up my analysis though.
1. "Estimating the number of failed projects is difficult because of these tactics, but most independent attempts to pinpoint the figure have landed at 50% or more."
Response: Kickstarter has a statistics page [1] that gives this information. It's not hard to find. And the failure rate is much higher than 50% in most categories.
2. "Retrovirus enjoyed a steady trickle of contributions towards its modest $75,000 goal."
Response: Actually looking at the statistics [2], 75,000 is on the high end for Kickstarter projects (more specifically, it's the 98th percentile for all projects, and the 99.4th percentile for successfully funded projects across all categories; if we look just at games, the percentiles are 93rd overall, and 96.8 for projects that actually made their goal), and carries with it a low funding rate (about 20% overall, slightly less than that for projects in the Games category)
So while it may be a "modest" goal as far as the costs of game development are concerned, it isn't modest for Kickstarter.
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/help/stats [2] currently unpublished data scraped from kickstarter.com; I'm nearly finished writing up my analysis though.