What @mwotton means to say is that we've made a lot of progress. We could probably eventually sell Ninja Blocks without Kickstarter, but certainly not to the quality we want.

Unlike software projects, hardware requires tooling, parts and materials. Kickstarter is allowing us to do this!

We're also open source hardware!

Cheers,

Marcus (I'm a developer on the Ninja Blocks project).

I'm not sure what you're troubled by. They're using Kickstarter to pre-sell rather than a traditional sales channel.