Crowd funding isn't about giving developers profit right out of the gate. It's to give the developers an opportunity to focus completely on making the game and make it happen faster than if a) the developer worked on it as a side project or b) if the developer saved up money first and then worked on it full time.
I think that this is an excellent summary.
One important thing to note of course is, lacking a benefactor of some sort, the money to pay the bills has to come from *somewhere*. Perhaps a publisher or investor is willing to front this money, perhaps it is crowdsourced, or perhaps the developer has saved up a chunk of change and is willing support themselves.
As to the source of funding, at some point you have to convince someone that handing over money to you to support your project is worthwhile. For self-funding, you have to convince yourself.
For a publisher or investor, they will have their standards that you must meet.
For something crowdsourced, you have a pool of x people who hear about your calls for funding, of which y people will consider that it is worthwhile. Rather than convincing one investor to take a significant risk, you are convincing y people to take a lesser risk. You have to have an attractive pitch of some sort- it might be your personal star power, or the strength of a past game, or that you're willing to fill a neglected market niche. Each of those x people have their standards as to whether or not they will invest. For any significant x, y will be less than x, ie. there were people who were not convinced. Most of the time, y will be non-zero as well, ie. you have convinced some people to take the risk.
PompiPompi, you have your standards on what people should and shouldn't do in their kickstarter projects, and this will drive the projects that you choose to support. A developer who wants *your* support will have to meet *your* standards. However, the important thing to realise is that with crowdsourced funding, everyone has their own standards, and any developer needs to convince sufficient people to fund it, but doesn't have to convince *everyone*. It is possible, in fact, I'd say very bleeding likely, that the benefit of getting the support of people who insist that the developer live on basic subsistence wages only simply isn't worth the cost. In such a position, I would personally be chasing the group of people who would rather see me on a proper living income.
PompiPompi, you have every right to hold the position that you have. One thing to note however is that if your standards are too high, and the impositions you would place too onerous, then unless you're offering a lot personally (eg. you regularly give out $10k funding packages to people who meet your requirements), then people may simply look at what you ask, say "too hard", and move on to the next person. If the fruit at the top of the tree looks just like the fruit elsewhere on the tree, I'm not going to get out my ladder to get that bit of fruit. I'll just pick from the lower-hanging fruit instead, or perhaps from the next tree, and fill my basket that way.
I would suggest that given the response so far in this thread, your standards *might* be a bit high, and as such, there may be few willing to make the effort to meet them.
Also, a final thought: You would appear to see any amount above subsistence income as a profit? I think that an argument could be made that profit is any amount above the wage that the same person could get working a stable job for someone else, and as such many developers working on such a project are taking a *loss*. I think in many cases many developers are willing to take a hit on their potential income to make their project happen. In fact, sometimes the reduced amount they would pay themselves is part of the pitch; that they're willing to give up a better life to make the project happen.
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