Well, I guess your problem is that you know very little about game development.
All you say is theoretical stuff. But you're kind of right. There shouldn't be such things like firm stretch goals in the first place. Game development is about tought choices and constant iteration in a highly unsecure environment. Fixed goals you "have to fulfil" are pure poison and Larian did the right thing not sticking to them. You know why? Because the game itself benefitted from that decision. What's better? A game with a huge list of predefined features that sucks or a game that cuts a few features (but maybe adds other features which emerged during development) that is pure fun?
The one reason why you should pledge for a game on kickstarter is indeed trust. But not trust in a list of fixed features. Trust in the capability of a developter to actually deliver an enjoyable game with a certain vision they presented to you. If you actually pledged for a certain single feature you made a big mistake and I feel with you. But then again you probably didn't understand how video game development works...
I don't rightfully know. Does my industry experience as a game developer 2000-2009 count for having at least some minimal understanding of the industry?
I've been on the sharp end of making such decisions with the rest of the team, implementing the consequences, and explaining to the guys commissioning games from us that things were not going to happen the way we originally agreed to because under the circumstances we now thought something else would work better or that the original promise turned out not to be feasible to implement. I would have thought that this gave me at least some insight, despite being away from the industry for a few years.
As you correctly note, explicit promises are damn dangerous to game developers due to the vagaries of development, but as far as I am concerned, you draw the wrong conclusion.
Game development is about making the hard choices, and given that this is the case,
you should be damn careful about making explicit promises in the first place, because you will be called upon them, no matter how reasonable from your own game development perspective it is not to honour them, and this goes double when you are making promises to financial backers, because what
you think are the most important things out of those in the original agreement and what your backers think are the most important things are not necessarily the same things.
And when you
do choose not to honour your explicit promises for what seems good reasons to you, which will occasionally happen, the important thing to do is to communicate your positive version of this story to your backers as quickly as possible, explaining why things are not going to happen the way they expected based on your promises when they decided to fund you, in an attempt at getting their buy-in of the changed development narrative.
This is the area in which Larian has been lax by not sending out a kickstarter update or making a sticky forum post focused on the original promises and how and why they decided to make changes or omit some of them, but instead leaving it for people to discover post release, with the understandable result that even weeks after release we still have people starting new threads about where the missing features are.
It is popular to state that a game is more than a feature-list, and this is entirely correct ---
which is why you should be damn careful when you seek funding based on a feature list.
As for kickstarter, stretch goals are a known danger because they fracture the expectations of your financial backers.
I'd prefer if they were less common, but if you are making them in the first place, for the love of God make them something that you can reasonably expect to make for considerably less money than the money you are asking for, such that it is almost certain that you won't end up being overwhelmed when your budget turns out to have been optimistic, as is often the case. It is even worse from my perspective when people make a promise of the "if we get X likes on Facebook, do Y" or other promises to add stuff that
isn't funded, but these are popular as a way of attracting more backers - backers whose pledges will likely go towards meeting the funding of some of your stretch goals.
