It’s 2021 not 2015 a lot of what has been said in the thread so far should be reasonably common knowledge and no great revelations. The wider Kickstarter issues go beyond the initial question a bit 😉 Companies enticing backers with deals that are to good versus backers wanting the undeliverable. I am not a particularly prolific Kickstarter backer, but have got everything I backed and had no bad experience in part because I look at projects realistically and don’t get caught up in the hype (much).

I did bail on one Kickstarter and ask for a refund and shipping costs were one factor in that decision. It probably wasn’t even a wildly inflated sum in proportion to the weight and volume being shipped. For me though the sum total I would have had to pay for everything I might have wanted to do with the game wasn’t worth the cost in the end. Rereading @jamescutts first post again – yes it was Joan of Arc 1.5 .

Could/should such large kickstarters give a reasonable guestimate up front? I would say yes it is in their interest as otherwise customers are going to bail on them at the pledge manager phase – or the calculation is many might grumble but few will ask for refunds.

But if you are going to be backing one of these mega games with X expansions and X add ons you have to be realistic. With shipping, just like everything else, you get what you pay for. The same goes for online purchases in general. The perk of free shipping is something that draws people into buying from one shop over the other. Shipping things around isn’t cheap or easy and it’s going to cost someone somewhere in the chain. Heavy or bulky items get pricey quickly.

And part of that is packaging too which is something often not considered because we throw it away. There is a difference in materials and cost of a large shipment versus a small book in a jiffy bag. And the overheads/time involved in sorting 100s or 1000s of parcels as opposed to 10. Just because I right now can ship you something really reasonably with courier X does mean company X gets the same rate on 1000 packages in 18 months.

Trying to exactly determine the shipping costs of say 20kgs of stuff split between two largish boxes 18 months in advance is near impossible. As someone who occasionally, but regularly has shipped the same weight/volume of stuff on the same route across Europe over the past 6 years I can say that prices fluctuate with the best courier by about 50%.

The past year has shown how different factors have an impact – eventually it will all normalise again, but people are going to/should insure themselves against this sort of thing. So either that cost is built into the product or into a vague and modifiable shipping charge.

Bottom line sure as a customer I’d like things super precise and transparent.  With all the factors at work with a Kickstarter I don’t think that can actually work and to think otherwise in my opinion is an illusion. As others have said nobody is being forced to back anything, do your homework, be realistic, set out what you want and what you want to pay for it and if something goes beyond that walk away.