All these people who gather funds through ICO's hold zero responsibility, projects that don't deliver on their promises should also be viewed as scams, because they either intentionally set unrealistic goals or just don't try hard enough, and in the end just put the money in their pockets. These kind of projects would have little chance of getting any funds through traditional means, but with ICO's investors are just throwing money at everything that pops up and has a website and whitepaper. When more people were realize that there's actually no successful projects that started as an ICO, token/altcoin market will crash and ICO will become a synonym for "scam" in everyone's mind.
I consider ICOs to be more like a some kind of charity.
People give their money for a project,but in 99,99% of the cases, they don`t get any profit from their tokens.
This is donating for charity or simply crowdfunding,not investing.