Ironically, the most successful crowd-funded project to date is a video game that is about to surpass all of last year's kickstarter video game funding. Star Citizen - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_funded_crowdfunding_projects

I am a backer who is pleased with what they have delivered thus far (mainly due to good communication and fairly steady feature releases). That being said, your analysis is spot-on. Mission creep is a concern for many backers as the feature list continues to build. Each additional programmer that has been added to build out a new stretch goal could've also been a programmer dedicated toward speeding the release of the core vision in the original kickstarter. Robert's wants to build an uncompromised sim and it is certainly within his grasp (true to life economy, killer 3D fidelity, multi-role lifestyles, etc) but the real enemy is the time it will take and the patience of his backers.

I think at this point they're about a year beyond the early estimates for delivering Squadron 42 which was first projected to land around this December (now projected for next fall-winter). If it wasn't for their fantastic ongoing coverage of the "making of the game" it probably would've begun to implode by now. Keeping their subscribers and backers completely in the loop has been the secret to their success up to this point.

I think the original Video Game Crash of 83 will be hard to beat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash_of_1983

Revenues fell from $3 billion in 1983 to $100 million by 85. Atari pretty much went under and the reason the NES is called the Nintendo Entertainment System is because they couldn't call it a Video Game Console for fear it wouldn't sell.

Also remember Kickstarter has more competition now than last year. I finally donated myself to a few projects, Adam Carolla's and RoosterTeeth's movie projects. Adam's on FundAnything and RT is on IndieGoGo. Carolla went FundAnything because their CEO came to him and made it easy to setup. RT however is very internet savy so they did their research and chose IndieGoGo and not KickStarter.

There's definitely a decline in gaming in the works. I'm a Call of Duty guy and the game gets worse every year. Pre-orders are down 3 million units from the last game, which was also down around 20% from the year before. I doubt it will be as bad as the Crash of 83, but something's coming.