To me, people expecting too much from these investments seem to not have not understood the deal. It is small scale venture capital with no guarantees.
Creating art for such endeavors is not trivial and a lot of work. In case of computer games often more work than the coding. So it would have to be a pretty great idea if you can do with minimal effort in that department.
Kickstarter at least is not this, because if it was VC then backers would be buying equity, not product (often at close-to-retail price).
Fig is closer, since it is set up so that you can purchase shares in future revenue of the project (or just buy the product like Kickstarter), but IIRC you still don't get an ownership share, technically (I haven't looked into it closely since it's not my thing, so could be mistaken).
IMO either one is actually preferably for creators to a VC model since they get to maintain full ownership and their only (semi-) obligation is to deliver the product people pre-paid for.
Imagine if you could fund a tech startup by pre-selling product to customers instead of slicing up ownership of your company before it's even off the ground.
Isn't that (not quite literally) the story of early SpaceX? Admittedly a pretty unusual case, but they did get large long term contracts to fund their development.
I know of a couple tech ventures that did exactly this...they (1) had established a minimum viable audience and then (2) queried their people for what they wanted and how much they would pay for it, and (3) developed technology that delivered above and beyond functionality at (4) less cost than people expected which resulted in (5) a lot of pre-orders that (6) they delivered on which (7) that was the genesis of how they raised $VC to scale rather quickly.
It's the same thing: look at what's already there, pay if you think that's good.
It doesn’t stop people from trying, but there is a reason so many project never get funded.
