One must remember that not all of that money goes to development though. They have to send out the rewards to us and stuff. And printing physical copies to give away to backers too. So this budget already includes some of the return of investment, which can't be considered in the budget at all.
A 6 million budget game funded outside of kickstarter will start making money once its released, while this has already made money and they're not gonna sell anymore copies to the people who already pledged. They're only gonna sell digital copies to people who didn't back this, and god know how many/few that will be... So basically they have to look at some of the money as profit, not money to put in the game.
I dunno if any of this made sense. I'm tired.
Yeah, the costs of backer reward fulfillment, the fees of Fangamer and 2 Player Productions, and the opportunity cost of lost sales on release are going to take huge chunks out of the Kickstarter money. I don't know the logistics of
huge Kickstarter campaigns, but I'm guesstimating about 10% of Kickstarter funding will go into reward fulfillment and about 30% will vanish into lost sales. And Fangamer and 2 Player combined may take out a few hundred thousand more when all's said and done (including all the little stuff that adds up, like travel costs, and bearing in mind that if Fangamer is handling reward fulfillment their fees will quickly scale up to the number of backers).
The lost sales aren't a huge deal for
us since Inti/IGA will see the money either way and the budget won't be affected (unless we want to see this turn into a franchise), but Kickstarter money definitely comes at a greater premium than venture capital or traditional publishing.