How a Beloved Tech Journalist Destroyed His Reputation with a Failed Kickstarter
The cost of lies: A Mineserver story
Robert X. Cringely, the pseudonymous columnist behind 'Accidental Empires,' raised over $35,000 on Kickstarter in 2015 to build tiny Minecraft servers. Despite repeated promises that shipping was imminent, the project never delivered. This detailed account traces years of delays, shifting excuses, and outright lies that turned a minor failure into a cautionary tale about the cost of deception.
In terms of development, this project was almost finished before the Kickstarter campaign began.
- firesteelrain
Building a mineserver today feels like it would be a lot easier with say a N100/N150 mini PC then with all of the modern open source Minecraft software components like Paper or Crafty. The idea was good, just too lofty and underpriced. Also fairly niche. Making it plug and play for nontechnical parents is what made the requirements difficult.
- syntheticnature
(2020)
I'd hope anyone who saw "Plane Crazy" would know better than to back a Robert X. Cringely Kickstarter, and I'd expect anyone who followed his tech takes for a bit would have acquired some salt to take with any claims he made.
There seem(ed) to be a number of folks absolutely obsessed with hounding Cringely (apparently dead, I know) over the Kickstarter in his irregular posts. Given the highest tier was $200 and the whole of the Kickstarter was $35.5k USD, seems like a lot of throwing good time/energy after a bad Kickstarter call. I'd be overjoyed if that was the worst case of someone walking off with my money I'd ever faced.
They are, or were I guess, free to do so, but it seems wasteful to spend the amount of time in his comments they did.
- WheelsAtLarge
This has bothered me from the start. I was not one of the buyers, so I have a different take on the issue. From all his writings, you get a sense that Cringely was a big-idea man, but he had very little ability to follow through on his next great idea or venture. It seems like he would lose interest once the hard part of building a business started to appear. In this case, it looks like someone revved him up on the idea of selling a low-cost Mineserver, I think it was his son, but he probably mispriced the true cost and did not calculate the amount of work it would take to get the project finished. I don't think he started out with the idea of not delivering the product. He was just not capable of following through on his grand ideas. Some people are dreamers, and others are doers. He was a dreamer, and you could sense it in all of his writings.
That's the thing with Kickstarter you never really know if you will ever get the product. This project just became one of the many Kickstarter projects that failed.