Kickstarters wants the backers to think it's a store, because the reality isn't very attractive. "It's like a store where you preorder, except 10% of the time we just throw your preorder away and you get nothing but we still charge you."
But the other 90% of the time that something does come through, it is something that likely wouldn't have been able to come to market to begin with. Granted some of those are for a good reason...
Is that the reality though? The biggest category on Kickstarter is board games, and many of those I've seen (and backed) there are being made by traditional publishers who would be more than capable of bringing the thing to market in the conventional way.
A lot of board games are things that are speculative in that production and initial print run costs might result in a money losing effort (and a lot of board game companies don't have great access to financing, even if they are confident that such a thing would be sufficiently profitable for the expectations of that industry -- there's not a lot of investors throwing money at the sector, unlike tech, because while there is some money to be made there, no one expects something on the scale of the next Facebook shoot off there.)
So Kickstarter with product-as-reward makes a lot of sense for going concerns there because they have fairly good ideas what production costs are going to be like and what scale they need to reach to get a product with particular features out.
Its not the sexiest use of Kickstarter, but its probably the most sustainable, and it does enable things that would otherwise be too risky to produce.
