Shouldn't you... you know, actually wait until it's released to call it a failure? And even then wait another few months to see how word of mouth sales go...?
Or longer, perhaps. Crpgs generally, even AAA ones, have notoriously long tails. That's a real problem (discussed by MCA and Cain on many occasions) where they're reliant on a publisher, and it results in insanity like where Troika made a profit on every game, with a mammoth success in the game that sent them under (V:tMB, still selling to this day), but none other than Arcanum made big sales in the first month, closing because they couldn't get a publishing deal (where those same publishers continued to rake in the royalties for a decade after the company went under). You might argue that a large contributor to the crpg decline was publisher sale modelling (i.e. the algorithms they use for calculating the likely total sales of a game using the purchase data gathered from the 1st 3 weeks of release) not accounting for long-sellers, and so drastically under-calculating the life sales of crpgs compared to CoD style shooters.
But with the developer owning their IP, a much lower early figure might be feasible if the game becomes a sleeper hit and provides a steady stream of income over the life of their next project. It's how Vogel made bank during the darkest years of the decline - I recall him releasing the stats at one point, and it was his strong and consistent back catalogue sales that kept him in business.
Kickstarter is a pretty shitty business model from a consumer perspective - give $$$ for a game that doesn't exist, where you're utterly reliant on trusting a developer who doesn't even have a proof of concept and may lack the skills to produce what they're promising, often betting on striking gold on things that can't be mechanically produced just because you have the desire and talent (how can you
plan to write another Torment? It needs more than good designs and talent because it isn't systems based and 'competence' isn't sufficient - it needs the kind of spark that a great developer might pull off a couple of times in a career, because they're decent at the rest of the design and just happen to hit creative gold on occasion (Lennon/McCartney aside, how many immensely talented songwriters have
ever have been able to say - 'we're going to write a brilliant pop song' and just do it, rather than managing a few brilliant ones scattered amongst a ton of decent-competent songs, despite aiming for brilliance every time?).
The fact that Kickstarter took off in gaming is because the publisher model was so utterly broken that a bunch of profitable markets had been so grossly ignored that masses of fans were willing to risk being ripped off, simply because there was no alternative. If there's one thing that I hope these games will achieve, it's to wake up the publishers to the fact that there are market segments ripe for the milking if they allow even a small portion of their budget to make games aimed specifically at that market, without compromising them for half-way crap that pleases nobody and cannibalises their existing mainstream IP sales. Fuck, if they love Hollywood so much, let them use that as an example. Set up pseudo-indie wholly owned subsidiaries where they can send their young/talented designers to get lead experience, play around with concepts that are too risky for the bigtime, spending a pittance compared to their big-sellers except also letting their 'indie division' borrow their big corporate brothers' distribution, marketing and technology to do more than what a genuine indie can afford (just giving them their engine, plus lending them some programmers and artists who need a break from the mass-production grind so they don't burn out, would be a big bonus). Allow 'special talents' to make risky projects with a free hand, in return for them using their 'prestige' to promote the mother label (like they do with Tarantino today, and with Kubrick in his time - the latter, in particular, even had to be reminded by the studio sometimes that they weren't going to put sales pressure on him, because they knew they'd be using his name to boost the image of their company for decades to come).