@CrazyIrish
Of course 5$ isn't tons of money and if you are sure you get something for that, it's well spent. But on kickstarter you can hardly know whether the game releases at all and if the game will be great as you purchase it in advance.
Of course you need to take into consideration that some games would never make it to the light of day if you would not give them money in advance. But everyone has to find the balance for himself. Ultimately, as I said - if you are sure you will love it, the money is well spent.
That said, forum hopping is also a way of entertainment, otherwise we probably wouldn't write here, right? It's not like we would change much with our little discussion.
@rune_74 what you put up in the first postings wasn't much of an discussion either which was also why I stopped replying as it felt like bumping my head against a wall.
Your last posting however has a point. But it is very hard to say if it is valid or not and a lot of things influence it. Spiderweb is a good example. Their games costed like the double or so in the past when they didn't sell them on steam. Because the fan base was small but strong and paid that money. Now with having steam and a much bigger audience they could lower the price to get a lot of people buying the game who just think they could like it. I bought Avadon at first and played it for tons of hours. And as the game was great I bought their next game Avernum as well.
Now I got one friend who picked up Avadon and played it for a couple of hours but didn't like it. And I have another one who picked up Avernum, and also dropped it after a couple of hours. And if you look into the achievement stats, that's a huge part of the customers. The majority of these people probably wouldn't have bought it for 20€ or so. Spiderweb apparently made a lot of additional profit with that and did that step also with several of their old games.
On the other hand, you have got two other extremes:
Maybe you know of Dominions3, another indie? game, released in 2006. This game still costs 55$. Maybe this game appeals to almost no one, but those interested in it, have no good alternatives. For a developer it's a risky step to say "lets sell it for 10$ now and see what happens" If they don't sell more than 5 times as much now, they are in a bad position of course. Steam mitigates this quite a bit.
The second example here is Distant Worlds. This game is still for 33€+21€+21€=75€ for the game with both expansions which enhance the game immenseley as claimed in the forums. Basically the same thing. If they selled it for half the price, would they sell twice as much? Maybe, and maybe not. And if they can live with it right now, they might not see the necessity to change it. Thoug my personal guess is, that they would make a lot more money if they would sell it for half the price on steam. I am also pretty sure that steam wouldn't even allow such a high price.