He beat up Lowtax. That's a career high point, for sure.

Yeah, beating up Lowtax was pretty good, I'll give him that.

Uwe Boll should've started a crowdfunding campaign to punch out more egomaniacal internet jagoffs. He'd never want for funding.

I enjoyed that part of Alone in the Dark where the dead woman started to get up off the ground before the scene ended.

Who needs profit sharing when you can get advance DVDs, production books, and you name in the credits!

On crowdfunding sites, you aren't an investor, but you're only taking a tiny risk. Feel free to pony up ,000 if you want to be an angel.

This made me look up the Kickstarter fees to see if they get anything on stuff that isn't funded.

I discovered that their "discounted micropledge fee" for pledges under is actually HIGHER than the normal fee if the pledges are over .

With the normal scale, a pledge of will mean $.50 in Kickstarter fees. Under the "discounted" scale, a pledge of will mean $.50 in Kickstarter fees.

A risk is a risk, no matter how small. If I'm taking a tiny risk, then it's not unreasonable to ask that I be cut in on a suitably tiny share of the profits. A businessman is asking me to fund his for-profit economic venture? Then given a choice between my name in the credits, or a single measly stock, I'd much rather take the stock, thanks.

Content-creators like crowd-sourcing because the resulting funds are over 90% raw exploitation (even the 10% fee taken by Kickstarter is nice, since it is a flat, one-time payment, with no further monetary obligations). Backers like crowd-sourcing because they generally think as you do, boner, "it's a tiny risk, so what?", and also because most of them don't even realize that they SHOULD be entitled to a share of the profits in the first place.

It's like the old Record-Label trick: offering an upfront pittance to an up-and-coming young band, when really, the band should be demanding a percentage.

Anyway, I don't want to come off as too critical, because overall I like crowdfunding, and I think with only a few tweaks it could be a truly spectacular social development. IN RELATION TO THIS VIDEO, my point is simply that Uwe is angry at crowdfunding over one of the things crowdfunding does *right*.

I think there are legal problems that haven't really been worked out. Like how do you actually give thousands of random people shares in your corporation, or a profit sharing deal, and actually manage it properly and without breaking regulations. There is probably too much overhead. It's worth it for one investor with ,000 but not for 1000 people with 10 bucks each.

Well, that and it's hard to abuse the German filmmaking subsidization tax breaks that make his films a profit even if they're disastrous straight-to-videos.

If they can work out a way to take from 1,000 poor people, I'm sure they could work out a way to compensate those poor people, if they really wanted to. It's not like determining stock ownership is a big complicated ordeal; again, all you'd really have to do is treat each Kickstarter like a really cheap initial public offering, and instead of stupid bullshit like a baseball cap or a thank-you letter, give backers one share of stock for every however-many dollars they contribute.

Take the Oculus Kickstarter, for example. VR isn't exactly new tech, and it's entirely possible that Oculus (as well as its contemporaries) will crash and burn like all the other attempts before it did. On the other hand, it COULD wind up being a huge success, and there's potential there for it to make everyone with a significant stake in the technology billionaires multiple times over. The original developers more or less bilked .5 MILLION from investors, mostly young people and fat nerds and other folks too poor to realize that they have just as much right to a return as some rich asshole investment banker. And then, last year (after the crowdfunding campaign was complete), Facebook bought Oculus for billion. Billion!!!! That's a thousand times more than the initial worth of .5 million. Now obviously this is a very rough estimate (I'm sure Oculus had more worth than just the stuff begged out of Kickstarter), but think about it: if you owned even a mere worth of "Oculus stock", you'd suddenly be up ten fucking thousand dollars! Every dork who ponied up cash for that Kickstarter would be able to buy a modest new car thanks to that sale, or even hold onto their ownership rights in hopes of seeing an even bigger return. But instead, the Oculus guys made out like emperors, and everyone else is left sitting on their couch, hoping that they'll have enough money to afford a computer that can run the Oculus system if and when it finally hits the market.

I think you're missing the point, homer. The issuance of stock is a very well regulated thing: right now they avoid dealing with the SEC by "donation" of funds rather than the more traditional investment arrangements.

If you want to invest in the traditional manner, there are a unending stream of financial products for you to use. It's pretty much the only industry America has, so there's a boat load of options.

This is different. What you are suggesting is to remove the one thing that does differentiate this product from the rest.

I see some real weaknesses with the crowd sourcing method, but this is not one of them.

As far as Oculus goes, I thought it was stupid until they brought out the version that works with just a phone, so you're not tethered to a computer. That thing is going to be awesome in a few years.

HA!

on uwe boll's demand

Time, like the position of a submission on the front page, is a relative thing.

Yeah that's weird. I think if a video gets universally 1-starred it leaves the front page, but I've never seen the reverse, not even for popular favorites. Maybe Mr. Boll is on here and is one of the people who donates on the front page!

I noticed that, too. I watched it when it first showed up, went to work, and when I came home there were half a dozen new videos under it but it was still at the top.

Oh god, you're right!