I considered this as a possible analogy and I don’t think the meeting of a friend is a good one. You agreed to meet your friend at a certain time and you went out of your way to be there, your friend didn’t put in the same effort and was late. You also only have a finite window in which that meeting can take place before you have to go home therefore by being late, your friend has affected your potential enjoyment of that meeting. Thus if your friend is late you have wasted your time and you are angry.

That doesn’t really apply to games – once it actually arrives you have an almost limitless window of opportunity to play it and you didn’t waste anything in the intervening time between the kickstarter and delivery. Using that analogy implies that you were excited about playing your kickstarter but only if you could play it on a specific date as opposed to playing it at a totally unspecified time, or that somehow your life was put on hold waiting for its arrival.

To go back to the friend analogy I can understand how that mindset could apply to monitoring progress against the kickstarter project. Each time they announce a delay you get less inclined to want to heae their excuses or whatever; they become habitual, you lose trust, you don’t care what they’re saying any more. However you have now received as close to a cast iron guarantee that you will soon have the Solomon Kane game, so you you don’t need to listen to more excuses. It’s actually going to turn up.

In your example, Mythic Games are the friend, not the product itself. So I think it is still possible and reasonable to allow yourself to be be excited about solomon Kane without necessarily being excited about Mythic Games. Separate the art from the artist, as it were.

If you’re not excited because their rules are never any good, then that’s fine but I don’t think that’s got anything to do with the project being late. At the moment, until it delivers its an unknown – like schrödinger’s rules. But even if we just accept that it’s now a guarantee that the rules will be a dog’s dinner, they would have been a dog’s dinner even if they delivered on time, so the driver for the loss in excitement is actually previous experiences with them, or a perception of based on other people’s experiences and reviews. Perhaps the delay is the icing on the cake, the straw that broke the camel’s back or whatever (“the miniatures are ok but other better ones are available, the rules are absolutely garbage and to top it all off its 18 months late!”). But I still don’t think it’s the main reason behind the lack of excitement is lateness – it’s all the other things. But if all of the other things you said about the project are indeed true, then it sounds like a project you wouldn’t really have been happy with anyway, regardless of when it delivered.

I get people being angry at delays, but I don’t think that anger is being targeted correctly.