Ah, Shovel Knight. The poster child and gold standard for a successful Kickstarter. Also an excellent game!
In decades past, development studios would plot out a game concept, determine its viability, assign a team, and dedicate funds and resources to make the game concept a reality. Sometimes the funds would come from an outside publisher or other interested party, and other times the development studio was part of a publisher, so it would be funded internally. If a game was fully developed, it would "go gold" and be submitted for approval by the company whose platform on which the game was to appear. Once approval was given, it would go into a queue for manufacturing, and the advertising hype cycle could begin.
That model still exists, of course, and is still used by many companies. But over the last decade, a new paradigm has gone from a novelty to a norm. With the rise of indie gaming, many smaller studios have sought other means of funding their creations. Couple that with developers from the old guard who want to continue to make retro-styled games or smaller adventures that don't warrant big budgets, and the larger publishing houses often see those projects as loss leaders, and they get very little attention next to the big franchises. The new paradigm for self-contained experiences is crowdfunding.
