Same can be said about any games prior to release …

Do we really need to tell people to actually think about the things they’re spending money one ?

“Buyer beware” should be a given for anything that has zero reviews of actual physical copies.
And even if reviews exist one needs to be careful that those are genuine reviews …

Kickstarter itself tells people that “it is not a shop” and these days you’ve got to check that “yes I understand that I am throwing away money”. It still doesn’t stop people spending money they can’t afford to burn, because people are stupid.

No system in the world can protect the ignorant from doing things that hurts them because every single system assumes a certain level of intelligence and brain capacity.

@tankkommander factoring cost inflation is one thing.
Factoring in a complete destruction of the entire distribution network is a whole different ballgame.
Predicting what the world will look like in one year is tricky enough under normal circumstances.
How many people accurately predicted Putin invading Ukraine prior to this year ?
Maybe a few peeps in the intelligence agencies … but normal people without access to that kind of data ?

The world has functioned for decades with shipments getting from A to B to be profitable enough for 1$ Chinese crap to make it across half the planet and still be profitable …
No one knew that a pandemic would disrupt that system within a single year or htat shipping companies would be *that* greedy.

People who can predict these things would have been named Nostradamus in ages past.

Not a single shipping company has said : we will only ever charge X$ per container … instead they kept raising prices as high as they could and then some, because they knew they had complete control.

No sane person would have predicted costs tripling …

And the reason is simple : nothing of this nature had happened before … so no one knew how the situation would develop.
All models assumed normal operations.

@templar007 I’d argue that it is logistically impossible and not exactly profitable for companies to not sell stock they have available for retail just so they can deliver the stuff they have already sold. The only companies that can do that are ones that have a means of generating profit that isn’t kickstarter based or that have no retail presence at all.  Economy of scale works against backers.