Ah man what a beautiful looking idea. Too bad I've been burned so many times that I'll never pay for an 'alpha' or 'beta' game again, let alone a kickstarter for one.
I backed "Hadean Lands: Interactive Fiction for the iPhone" [1] in 2010. The project promised a text adventure game for iOS and open-source game framework. The game would become the author's "day job" and "might take six months; might take more." Based on the cool concept and the author's ludography of interactive fiction games, the $8,000 project was funded to $31,000.
Fast-forward four years and the author posts occasional Kickstarter updates about unrelated iOS games he's published and that the promised game is now "11% complete". His explanation is that the fine print of his Kickstarter proposal included "other IF work", but reading backers' comments [2] as early as 2011, you can tell that people felt mislead.
Lots of pretty graphics from an unknown team that hasn't been tested.
From my experience, the difference between teams like this that failed and the other newcomer teams that succeeded are that the teams that eventually delivered had a working demo or prototype that was downloadable.
