Alien Frontiers - another Kickstarter success

Back at the end of April, I posted on another Kickstarter donation campaign, this one for a game called Alien Frontiers.  Well, they're over $11,000 with just under a couple weeks to go, marking yet another successful use of Kickstarter for pre-sales.  About $7500 of their pledges are at their basic, $50 level, which gets you a copy of the game.  They report here at BGG  that their print costs are going to be probably in the neighborhood of $15,000 (my guess is that after shipping and other costs this bleeds up toward $20,000) for 1,000 copies, so a $50 sale price per game with $15-20 production costs is probably a good target for them, although a bit steep for the retail market.  I haven't seen much on the game yet, but it does seem to have a ton of bits.

I'd be interested if they manage to sell out the 800+ copies that aren't yet spoken for.  I'd also be interested what ratio of their funding comes from anonymous donors.  I asked a couple folks about this for earlier Kickstarter projects (see here and here), and it seems to be actually about a third to a half of the buyers in these things are unknown to the organizers - a far higher ratio than I'd have guessed.

It looks like Kickstarter is a great way to leverage game production.  My earlier misgivings seem nearly entirely unwarranted in the light of these three projects.