Laughing Man said:
If you flip the process, you pay us for the game before we even make the game then they have your cash, have no one to answer too on the developement direction or schedule and since they already have your cash what does it matter what the final product is like?
This is only true if you never want to make another game, or if your fans are so dumb that they can't remember your past games and its not like everyone who will buy the game is preordering on kickstarter, so it still needs to be good enough to sell. Also look at all of the people that preorder games before they are finished, they have no idea if the game will be good, but no one complains that allowing preorders is a bad idea. And its not like you can ever know that you will definitely enjoy a game before you play it so you are typically not buying a game based on the finished product but by your expectation of what the finished product is. There is always uncertainty when you buy a game and while with kickstarter there may be more uncertainty it is also at a lower price than if you waited and bought the game new.
There will probably be lots of half finished games that get released by devs that have no idea what they are doing, but there will also be really good games that would not have been able to be made any other way and its not like having publisher funding in anyway ensures that a game will be good, most games that most publishers release are crap, many even end up half finished, half arsed poor quality games, and there are many games funded by publishers that never even get finished.
In many ways this is a better business model then the publisher funded one because you accurately know whether or not there is a market for the game you want to make, creators get to keep their creations, creator directly benefit from the game being good, rather than a flat payment whether its good or bad, you cut out the waste that a publisher introduces, and you remove the tampering that happens because most big publishers don't understand target markets. The only benefits the publisher funded model currently has is that a lot of money can be put into development without direct contribution from the end users.
In the end what really matters is that for some people there is no chance of getting the kind of quality games that they want under the current business model and they are willing to pay, some times large amounts of money, just to have a chance to get the kind of games that they enjoy playing.
