A few other things you may not know about that though is that Cloud Imperium Games does have stock holders. While it may not be a publicly traded company (could be wrong, but don't think so), they are getting investments from that end as well, which I don't know goes against the "We won't take outside investment or developer funding if we pass $23mil".

He was quoted this past week saying

"We don’t care about making profits for public shareholders. We just care about making the Best Damn Space Sim Ever and you generous support has already allowed us to go way beyond what we thought would be possible upon initial release!"

So without those constraints of actual investors and public shareholders and having to worry about making them money on their investments, they are able to do more with less money. They don't have corporate bigwigs making millions of dollars with multimillion dollar bonuses and such to worry about.

They are also partnered with Origin, the original company he made Wing Commander for.

Also, people for some reason seem to mistake crowdsourcing (which is a donation of sorts) to investing, as if they've bought into the company and expect to make a return on their investment. It never has, nor will it be like that. The only return we expect to get is a game, and hopefully a good one at that!