It's not start-up capital because it's not an investment vehicle. Plus they're selling things.
Yes we know they're selling things, but I'm using the equivalence of how a normal business would operate:
Say you wanted to start a business selling burgers from a van.
Before you can sell any burgers, the business needs certain things;
A van
The equipment to make burgers
Fuel for the van and ingredients for the burgers *
Start-up capital is needed for the above. Once purchased and set up, you can now go and sell burgers, thereby generating revenue.
Subtract the daily cost (staff, fuel, ingredients, pitch fees) from the daily revenue and the remainder is pre-tax profit.
If it was a normal business, the 'pledges' received by CIG should really be considered as start-up capital, because the money received via pledges is supposed to be used to work towards v1.0 of the games, when income from game sales would be the revenue.
Another thing a normal business would do would be to preserve the start-up capital as much as possible, to guard against unforeseen events (delays, higher than expected costs etc). So the business owners would typically pay themselves as little as possible, to preserve that vital capital. Once revenue is coming in and the business is proved to be profitable, the owners can then increase their salary** and pay themselves bonuses**/dividends, knowing that they're not starving the business of cash. This is why I'm interested in knowing how much the main principals are paying themselves. I'll bet it isn't 'as little as possible'.
* These are actually ongoing costs, but something is needed to start you off
** Assuming an individual owner has a job within the business. Otherwise it's just dividends, as anyone who owns shares/stocks will understand.
