Crowd-funding is a mixed bag for me, and it seems to be getting over-saturated these days. I'm also gonna kind of put Early Access games in the same boat while I'm talking about this. I have supported a few projects but not a crazy lot personally.
In general there are 2 major issues I have with helping to fund these projects in their early phases long before something would be finished.
They take forever to get completed and you can almost always expect delays to the release date. There are titles I've contributed to over a year ago I'm still waiting on. Usually this isn't as much of a bother cause in most cases the delays will justify the improvements but it's certainly a test of patience in the long run.
The 2nd thing is that the original vision and the final product can end up being very different things and you can start feeling pretty betrayed as the project goes on..
I funded Indivisible which is being made by the team that did Skullgirls which I enjoyed. After playing the alpha demo I was excited largely cause i liked a lot of the character designs and the world. As development has moved on though, many of the character designs are being changed quite a bit from their original artwork on the indiegogo page they used for the funding, (this art was rather polished, these weren't just sketches) and in turn look much more simplified and just not as good as they originally did. It's being done to make animation easier and faster and feels like a cop-out to me. I'm not at the point where i'm disgusted with it yet but i went from being rather excited to being on the fence. I'm waiting for the new early access demo for backers to come out which I hope is soon so I can see how much it'll have changed since the original alpha demo that's still currently available.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/421830/Indivisible_Prototype_Demo/
There was another early access board/card style game called Shardbound also available on Steam and in that instance I was really digging the lore and world and art again and it had a few intro campaign type missions and rather then developing the single player content the game's development team focuses almost entirely on PvP and offers little to no progress for people that want to play solo more often. I've basically shelved the game cause I have nothing left to gain in it playing alone and I'm not much of a PvP guy. If more story/single player content comes along I may be interested in jumping back into it.
Though last I had read about it, they were running out of money and their deal with a partner fell through, and now they won't be uploading as much of the art/animations for the cards/units that have placeholder stuff currently. So it sounds like progress on the game was starting to stagnate, another problem with crowd-funding. They will depend on you to keep giving them more money or don't spend the money they receive wisely enough.
Thankfully that was a Free to play model that you could put money into for card boxes to support it if you wanted but once it started leaning mostly toward PvP I was glad I hadn't spent anything on it yet.
I have some more examples of good and bad that I could get into if this ends up an interesting discussion, like Shovel Knight was very good for instance, but i bought that after it was released as does Shantae which was mentioned.
Some other things I did contribute to that I'm still looking forward to the finished product are...
Cross Code
http://store.steampowered.com/app/368340/CrossCode/
This I helped fund maybe 2 years ago but has always had a playable game consistently being updated.
and
Henshin Engine
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sarumaru/henshin-engine-the-game-pc-engine-tg-16-pc-steam
which after waiting about a year now is finally almost done...
Anyway, I'm not all that keen on the crowd-funding methods cause they're risky and you have to wait a very long time in most cases. So I find if a project looks interesting I just keep checking back to it periodically and see how its coming along and either help fund late or wait till the game is finished and purchase it then if it still looks good. I don't usually jump on early unless I have a really good feeling about it, be it I like the Team's previous work or I like what's available and it's already far along to start with.
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