Backed Or Whacked: May The Funds Be With You
Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.
A short time ago on a crowdfunding site not very far away…
Always a popular weapon to rebuild, the Death Star has appeared as a Kickstarter project requiring a modest £20 million for plans and enough chicken wire to protect the exhaust ports. But not thinking bigger would cause one to find the project owners’ lack of faith disturbing. The group has also set a stretch goal of £543 trillion (or US$850,000,000,000,000,000) for construction of the actual planet destroyer. It may seem like a tidy sum, but the group assures that it is doing everything it can to keep costs down by using open source hardware and software. Indeed, few know that the first Death Star was prototyped on a Makerbot printer that was R2-D2’s second cousin once remade. The world-wiping weapon ran on nothing more than an Arduino board programmed by mass-murdering Sith Lord and popular Maker Faire speaker Darth Solderous.
Thoughtful backers have weighed in on the campaign. One, for example, bemoans the lack of a premium reward tier with the opportunity to press the button that generates the next Alderaanian fate. Alas, while funds have been pouring in and the campaign passed the £200,000 mark some time ago, there’s scant chance of the campaign attracting a sum more than 10 times the global GDP by April 1, an ending date that seems significant for some reason.
An initial rush of funds has swept in, but their only hope will have to be a lot richer than Obi-Wan Kenobi. That means that no one will be able to claim the $10,000 reward tier of extensive Jedi training. Despite the certainty that project owner Simon Kwah will miss his target like a stormtrooper, he has created an array of imaginative Star Wars-themed stretch goals. These include approximately $4.5 billion — the total gross of all the Star Wars movies — for a fleet of X-Wing fighters. And 13 million Galactic Standard Credits will net a Millenium Falcon plus crew. Despite aligning with the other side of the Force, the X-Wing Squadron campaign will wrap up along with the Death Star campaign on April 1.