4 pages about FTL's Kickstarter have occurred because most of us have now hit the mean-time-to-content-expiration threshold.
By the way, $180k is somewhere between 4 and 8 months worth of development time for a 4 man team at competitive wages.
The team working on FTL live in China, and living standards here are reduced by a factor of 4 or so, even in Shanghai. That's 32 months!
Anyway, fenrif has a point. Funding is not donating, and it's not purchasing. As a matter of accounting, your funding should not be profit. The Kick-It-Forward initiative is a good example of developers stressing that funding is not profit, to be freely used like profit. Truth be told, Kickstarter is actually a rather rickety concept that straddles angel investing and pre-ordering. It's going to have teething problems when the proposed timeframes on some of these projects begin coming due.
Why do people back projects?
A lot of backers are rallying around their friends' projects. Some are supporting people they've long admired. Many are just inspired by a new idea. Others are inspired by a project's rewards — a copy of what's being made, a limited edition, or a custom experience related to the project.
Stop taking the "KickStarter is not for donations" and "KickStarter is not a store" out of context.
"KickStarter is not for donations" means this:
Prohibited uses:
No charity or cause funding.
Examples of prohibited use include raising money for the Red Cross, funding an awareness campaign, funding a scholarship, or promoting the donation of funds raised, or future profits, to a charity or cause.
No "fund my life" projects.
Examples include projects to pay tuition or bills, go on vacation, or buy a new camera.
"KickStarter is not a store" is a response to backers going into KS thinking it's some sort of on-line catalog, and "buying" something they like to be delivered to their house, based on pictures or whatever, explained in
this blog post.
So, while KickStarter is not a store, you may STILL BE PURCHASING (with strings attached).
While KickStarter is not for donations, you may STILL BE DONATING to support a developer you like.