Could be sour grapes. How does this guy know why he wasn't funded? He blames the community. Surely his environmental, educational game is not at fault. I don't know, but I know he must naturally be quite un-objective.
"With his funding, he planned to make the game available for free on the web, and Crawford suspects that's one of the main reasons why his campaign went down in flames."
Perhaps of note is that Kickstarter's model is based off the Street Performer Protocol, originally intended as a solution for getting private funding for free, public goods.
There is a whole Open Software category on Kickstarter, so clearly "free" is not a reason his campaign failed. Quite frankly, it failed because his vision put "simulation" before having an actually engaging game.
"In my case, I had a working game that was only halfway finished, so everybody saw a zillion flaws. There's an interesting question there: Is it better to show a half complete thing to give people an idea of what it is, or do you keep it all hidden until it's ready?"
I suspect that was the primary cause here, far more than any other factor. Kickstarter is for selling a vision, and a half-reality is the worst version of a vision.
The biggest problem for me was that he didn't explain why the project needed $150k. From the (granted, simplistic) explanation, it sounded like something that could be built in Flash in a couple of months.
Most of the work went into the simulation, not the UI. That's why it looks like it could be done simply in flash. (BTW I used JSF, with JQuery and CSS, but that does not matter so much). He has been working on this project for well over a year, and has blogged his work: http://erasmatazz.com/TheLibrary/GameDesign/DesignDiaryBotP/...
