Luckmann wrote:Failing is different from reprioritizing. You speak as if content was cut because everyone got dysentery, which is false.
No, but because of other priorities (new ideas that they evaluated were more important to making the game great) and variations over the planning fallacy (underestimating the cost/complexity of some features). It's pretty much common in any project for the final set of features to vary significantly from the initially set of features, that's true in every 3-6 months projects I've worked on, it's even _more_ true on a 4-years project, without any "lying", intention to deceive or bad faith from anyone involved.
And overall I would say it's good for the creative team to be able to follow their evolving creative vision, to not be stuck in following the letter of what they imagined 4 years ago, because that's just not how creativity works, you keep getting ideas which replace or conflicts with already planned ideas, and you need to be able to chose freely what will work out the best.
That's how creative works are made, always. The only difference with Kickstarter is that, due to the way crowdfunding works in general and to stretch goal mechanism in particular, they are "forced" to give out much more details on what they think they'll do very early during the project life, so we backers can see those evolving, changing goals, something we don't usually see.
And some people, not understanding (or not wanting to understand) how creative projects work, feel betrayed and call "lies" when they, naturally, evolve their vision and re-adjust priorities as they work on the game.
It is a problem, because some people end up being frustrated and angry (a small minority of backers, sure, but even one angry/frustrated backer is a problem), but what is the solution ? If you look at BT4 and WL3, inXile gave much less details out during the campaign, I believe (but I don't read their mind) it was in huge part to avoid some backfiring from (a few but vocal) upset backers - but that's not really a solution either, we got plenty of people complaining they didn't give enough details and not backing because of that.
If you've a magical solution allowing them to give many details during the crowdfunding campaign, and yet keep the creative freedom to adjust priorities when they get new ideas or when an idea once prototyped doesn't work as intended or when they felled (they are only humans after all) to the planning fallacy, I think everyone would be interested to hearing it.