Not to mention that it's not like they're even getting the full sum they gather - kickstarter takes its cut, they're probably paying some taxes from that and, of course, they'll have to spend some part of it on the backer rewards. Those may not be the hugest losses, but considering we're talking about a budget which isn't exactly adequate even when it's "full"... ATM, kickstarter is more like a scam & attention whoring hybrid instead of a proper funding platform. At least for the projects of this scale - I mean, I look at the Underworld Ascendant & their promises and I have no clue how can you actually fulfill that on 860k if you're situated in Boston. In a non-checkbox manner, at least.
To put the money thing into perspective.
Kickstarter takes 5% of a successful project's donations. On top of that they pass on the processing fees for payment to the project so that's another 3% - 5%.
That leaves 90% to the project.
Salary, taxes, etc don't come into the equation as an additional deduction compared to any other project with whatever funding. When a company says that a project cost 10 million that 10 million is the total amount before taxes, operational costs, etc.. As such the funding received from a kickstarter campaign is directly comparable to any other project's funding.
If a publisher gives 5 million that's the same as raising 5 million after fees for a kickstarter project. The main difference is that a publisher will expect that money back while the money from kickstarter is their's with no strings attached other than backer rewards.
The pre-sales, excuse me, I mean the donations don't really take from potential profits. In fact, the average price per unit is quite high due to whales happily paying over 100 USD per unit. Kickstarter is a really good way of doing pre-orders from a business perspective since you can get people to pay five times (or more) retail for a product. If you only did pre-sales at the retail price you'd lose out on all that extra money.
Personally, I don't like companies treating kickstarter as a lucrative pre-order marketplace but I can understand the business logic to do so.
inXile made money from Wasteland 2 and they will probably make money from Torment. Assuming that as a business they retain some of their profits to fund future projects / survive bad times then inXile is in a great place financially already. A kickstarter campaign is just a good way to get more money out of fans instead of doing straight up pre-orders.
