@missacre: It's not that they cannot afford. It's that they can't afford to make the game they want, or simply prefer to crowdfund and risk losing the trust of their customers to ruining their life in the process. You might think that what was presented in Indie Game: The Movie was an exaggeration, but it's really not, considering the scale of the games presented in that thing and amount of resources they have - which is two dudes. It's possible to make this sort of stuff on your own as evidenced, but lives have been turned upside down in the process. Like Jasper Byrne, who's marriage collapsed in the process of making Lone Survivor. Or the guy who made Cook, Serve, Delicious! which only managed to turn in a profit thanks to Ryan Davis.
Not to mention the fact that often people don't want to put up with publishers. Patrice Desilets was the creative director for Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft's cash cow, and look how he was fucked over them recently. When Tim Schaefer was pitching Brutal Legend, he was told that unless he makes the same game about hip-hop culture, it won't get done and once he made the game he wanted, he got screwed over by EA's marketing.
AAA publishers won't do that because crowdfunding is a) a gamble much higher than giving cash for a new IP, since publishers have at least one blockbuster to sustain such ventures and b) gives a degree of creative control to the customer.
It's wise to be wary of it and not 100% trusting, but most of the time it's not people trying to ride the Kickstarter bandwagon, but trying to use a new form of funding to create.
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