Crowd Funding Prototype vs Final Product

One thing that always amazes me when watching crowd funding previews is how good the games already look despite being way before production even starts and often a year or more before the final product lands on our door steps. Where do all those components come from? If the game looks that ready, why not kick off production immediately? What are publishers doing between campaign end and productions start? I rarely ever ask publishers for preview copies and when I did, the copies have usually already been assigned. Part of it is that I don’t really cultivate an active relationship with publishers, part of it is that of course crowd funding is a visual thing and so YouTube is much better suited to show of a soon to be launched game … and I guess the fact that I write rather critical about games also doesn’t make me a prime candidate for hyping something. Long story short, I’ve only held a single crowd funding prototype in my hand, that was for World Order. I had this idea of it being…