Have you? Publishers and outside funding are not a requirement. Traditionally games have been funded with the profits from previous projects, just like companies in general have funded their R&D and future investments.
The main problem is that with standard business model it's usual to be paid for your work. In game development publishers often take the advantage of overpriced international lawsuit and simply don't pay you. I am speaking from my own experience having developed 4 games myself and participated on many others.
That's the unbelievable wild-west in game industry, which is not imaginable elsewhere (well, music recording industry came close once). There are also very good publishers who have been nice to us of course.
With our last game only a proper cease and desist letter costed us 2000 GBP and we will never see a dime from sales till this day. Moreover we had to pay taxes from the royalty invoices which were never paid to us. Expenses would vastly overshadow the incomes.
And even if the said publisher breached the contract in 10 or so points, it's just a piece of paper. Unless you are rich enough to afford good international lawyers, which indie studio rarely is. And the prices go there to hundreds of thousands of pounds.
So this is where kickstarter comes in. You can afford to develop your game without investing your own money and risking that someone will steal it. Moreover you know your audience and this is all great idea. Unfortunately it attracts also people who want to abuse the system. Still I am glad kickstarter exists.
Kickstarter was never meant to be a preorder system. People perceive it as one nowadays, but the idea about rewards is to get people something extra for their bigger donations.
The cost of production is what matters. Even if people worked for quite a minimum salary eg. $1300, with taxes here you have to pay almost $2000 per month/man.
That's 24000 / year. If the team has 5 people (tiny indie team) and they agreed upon such a low salary, you have to give them $120 000. Usually the development cycle for a game is around 2 years so $240 000. Count in studio expenses (office, computers, software and upgrades, telephones etc. etc.) Is it still weird to ask for such a money?
Now basically the majority of your audience already pledged (in case of indies) so if you calculate it exactly for the development span cycle and even if you are absolutely on the time with the release, another problem occurs. What next? You've burned your money already on the development and you have none to pay for the upcoming few months? Or you close down after this one game?
So I can see, that some of the indies count with this and add a little bit extra to survive before the game sort of picks up with another sales.
This being said, I fear that the idea of Kickstarter for indies might die because the big names will take all the money playing the "it's safe to invest with us, we're experienced" tune. Crowdfunders only have a limited amount of money and with this huge influx of projects they of course prefer the safe ones.
Just my 2 extremely long (sorry about that) cents.
