That certainly happened with Broken Age. They were looking for $400k in Kickstarter funding and ended up receiving $3.3m. You'd think receiving 8x more than they asked would be enough, however they got a bit carried away and wildly scaled up their ambition then overspent on celebrity voice acting, live orchestras, marketing, etc, almost like an AAA then ran out of money halfway through. This forced them to split the game into two halves and sell the first + push for pre-orders for the 2nd half just to finish the game. The first half was liked but was criticised for having too easy puzzles, then they overcompensated to that and made the 2nd half's puzzles completely obtuse and tacked on a very weak rushed ending at the last minute leaving it feeling very "bi-polar". In the end, a lot of us were left wondering how much better the game could have been if it were released in one fully funded piece under better management (like Thimbleweed Park was) without the "buy part 1 and pre-order part 2 or you'll be left with half an unfinished game".

Pre-orders may not be the only cause of this (it's also why I dislike episodic games in general) but they certainly enable bad managers of small studios to boot out more unfinished stuff on the back of a promise vs if they had to fund it up front and were forced to scale back their ambition to match their funding / competence level. And even AAA's can suffer. Deus Ex Mankind Divided springs to mind where Square Enix forced Eidos Montreal to break the game up into two pieces against their will to try and milk $120 for one plot only for sales of part 1 to flop badly, so part 2/2 never got made and part 1 left unfinished and feeling a very weak "sequel" to Human Revolution by itself (obvious red flag being a 15hrs main plot vs nearer 25hrs of DX1 & HR). And that was saturated in intelligence insulting "tiered pre-order" nonsense that was quickly scrapped.

Interesting point about Broken Age, thanks!

And they made a documentary about it all that was sold at GOG, which I am guessing like me, you bought & watched.

It starts off so well, and then gets depressing toward the end. Bean counters sure know how to spoil a game, but then developers sometimes bite off more than they can chew. I guess you reach for the stars but often fall short.

The gaming industry is quite fraught with issues much like the movie and music industry. Knowing what I have learnt over the years about them, I don't think I could ever trust any of them enough to pre-order or help kickstart.

You'd think with the relative success of older games sales in the last decade or so, that some smarter publishers would be prepared to take a longer view than they have. But just like the movie industry, it's all about a quick return of large profits. Thankfully the Indie Games developers etc are now part of the better games mix.