This pre-order stuff is crazy.......

[makomk]

KickStarter has shown upfront financing can be highly effective.

Sure, there are flame-outs.  That does not detract from the successes.

I'm not sure whether there's actually been a large-scale Kickstarter project that's actually delivered yet. In particular, a lot of the high-profile ones for electronic doodads have been massively delayed, and most of the really huge gaming ones aren't even due to give anything to backers for some time.