It's hilarious to me that having taken money for items still to be delivered, that he thinks left-over money from pre-sales is profit. That's why I didn't even bother wasting my time going further.
Yes.
Interestingly, although nothing to do with actual accounting, SC has been in development so long that a huge percent of Backers have already effectively written off their spending.
They have downgraded their expectations, made so many excuses to themselves and are so lacking in critical thinking that you can almost treat them like new potential customers.
It is the experience of development process that Backers are actually willing to pay for and getting satisfaction from.
"And as we consume less, we are doing more. “If you think about the 20th century, the big dominant value system was materialism, the belief that if we had more stuff we’d be happier,” says James Wallman, a trend forecaster and the author of Stuffocation: Living More with Less, in which he charts the move from possessions to experience. “The big change to what I call experientialism is more about finding happiness and status in experiences instead.”
The happiness bit perhaps stands to reason, but studies suggest the anticipation of an experience has a crucial, additional value. In a 2014 paper called Waiting for Merlot, psychologists Amit Kumar, Thomas Gilovich and Matthew Killingsworth showed how people report being mostly frustrated before the planned purchase of a thing, but mostly happy before they bought an experience. That feeling lingers longer, too, tied up as it is with memory. “We call it hedonic adaptation,” says Colin Strong, the head of behavioural science at Ipsos, the market research group. “And the hedonic payoff of experiences is much greater.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/13/just-do-it-the-experience-economy-and-how-we-turned-our-backs-on-stuff