And don't get me wrong. I totally would like to have a good new space combat game too, like a lot of people. And I think that there's room for a business model where players who really want to see a sequel to a much-loved game are willing to commit a (limited) amount of funds towards it.

But I also think that it needs to be made extremely clear that any given project may fail, that the business model needs to involve oversight from someone like a traditional publisher with the ability to say "this project isn't working", milestones, someone with expertise in the field running the numbers on the financial side, and some mechanism to stop the developer from just trying to buy their way out of the hole with larger promises.

The game development process does have a certain amount of risk. Part of doing game development is managing it and relatively-gracefully dealing with failure. I think that it might be nice to have someone produce some kind of intermediate model, something where a would-be customer can choose to expose themselves to risk, but also where there's a route to kill the project if it isn't going well. That protects the developer as well as the players -- the developer can't commit themselves to something that they can't do, and the players can only lose so much.