A lot of this depends upon the nature of the project itself. Those which are closer to being finished or are being used to jumpstart production costs can often roll out quite quickly, whilst others which are much more at the early stages will often have unforeseen delays or new features added or even changed.

The key is that the developer treats their KS investors right and keeps them in the loop of what is happening and why. So long as the team are working on the project and its progressing then most people can accept delays for legitimate reasons. The problems come when a company goes quiet since that leaves investors not knowing what is happening.

Another is how matured the company is, a very matured company doing what it does best will generally have more reliable estimations and also more attainable goals with less problems. Newer companies (even if comprised of experienced individuals) will often have more changes over time, more shifts and also more unexpected events. It's the nature of the beast and something to keep in mind.

Another point to consider/remember is that more money doesn't always mean more staff - most projects and teams can only go so big whilst remaining a viable company. The company itself won't want to lumber itself with too many employees otherwise they could end up increasing their outgoing costs or building up a reliance on temp staff that they can't afford in the longer term. This is often why things like Stretch goals won't decrease production time as there is only so much that be done by the team itself. KS is often there to allow the companies increased "speed" because of the cash injection speeding up investment processes (over say long term profit investment from a companies product sales0.

Definitely, and code isn't something that necessarily parallelizes very well. It's that more people adding code that may or may not know precisely what other people are doing, and you'll find that certain code has to be finished before other code is written.

Otherwise, Vista would never have taken that long as MS could have just doubled the programmers and had it done very quickly.

I like the delays. I have too many other games to play to worry about my kickstarters.

The single delay is probably unforeseen but there are so many of them that statistically you can count on them. If the backers want a more realistic estimate the project owners should either include some extra time for unforeseeable delays. Or Kickstarter calculates an average delay factor out of given release dates and actual release dates in each category and pledge amount and publishes this factor.

Wasn't Faster Than Light also a Kickstarter project?

Thing is though, there's nothing lazy going on with the more noticiable projects at least, those with people with track records behind them. I've seen delays, that are part poor management due to green entrepeneurs, but even those in part can be placed among massively exceeded numbers.

In somce cases the delays come as a result of poorly managed funds. I've backed one project which is clearly failing because of fund mismanagement, the lack of skills and poor leadership.

The extra money pays for prolonged development time, not extra people.

One problem is that it's impossible to edit the reward dates, and people don't follow everything the developer say, so even when they do tell you up front that it will take more time (which they often do), people still ask: "it says January on the reward, where's my game?"

Having worked in software for many years, I never expect a project to be released on time. As long as the developers are continuing to work on the game, I'm fine with that. Besides, it's not like "when it's done" is not common enough for commercial games either. Release date often get postponed. There's no reason to expect that to change just because you paid for them up front.

I guess this is where publishers will find their reason for existence - having more experience and sorting out the promising ones from the not so promising ones or having expertise and supporting the dev teams with the management. Otherwise if all crowd-funded projects would be a success who would still need publishers.

There always is the risk, that new companies don't have the right people handling their finances. That in its own right can lead in problems. That's why I usually back more seasoned people.

You're right, it was, brain fart:)

Perhaps. But I see publishers get it wrong just as often. And they don't say, "we are late because we are adding more things because we have extra money". They typically use the "polish" excuse, which they should just stop doing because when the game comes riddled with bugs after "polish" delays... its a hard issue to sell after that.

I'd say Kickstarters should plan on stretch goals in advance... but I already assumed they did. So it seems they would still get pushed back a little even if they did.

The positive is that I'm hopeful kickstarter projects are pushing back for genuine polish whereas a publisher might be more tempted to release a project for RoI. Since kickstarter's aren't really using their own investments... hopefully they will be more apt to do it right. (not having seen the final products yet, I'm still very new to backing).