Spot on.

I'm not expecting a huge burst of income from the pre-purchases, so that I would suddenly be able to pay a monthly salary to myself and be able to leave my day job and concentrate all my time and efforts on RWR or to hire more people on the job or to buy a mac to be able to port and test the game. Obviously if that would happen, it would be awesome beyond belief, but it's really not likely to go like that and I'm ok with that.

The money will go for the game development, I have no intention to buy food for our cats with the pre-purchase funds. I need money for e.g. sound effects, participating in e.g. IGC has a fee, if possible I might be able to take some days of non-paid vacation from my day job to allocate full days for developing RWR and cover the loss of day salary from the pre-purchase funds. Those are just some examples how the money could be spent.

Also, simply seeing financial support from people who truly want to see this project to continue and succeed (thanks to all of you guys who have pre-purchased the game or donated for it!), helps keeping me motivated with taking the project to completion. That's hugely important too. In return, they get the early version of the game and get to have fun with it and of course they get the final game when it's done.

Obviously, people see the worth of things in very different subjective ways. If this means that there will be less beta players than by still going free-to-play, I'm ok with that. I think I will get the best improvement suggestions on the game features from the people who really like the project so much that they are ok with the pre-purchase deal.