They don't need crowdfunding. But isn't it a nice perk for Hasbro to be able to flip the production costs onto the consumer?

In the past, a company had to pay out of pocket to fund the development and production of a product. If they misjudged potential sales, they ran the risk of getting stuck with a bunch of unsold things to liquidate.

Now, with sites like Kickstarter, they can shift all the risk to their customers. Much less dead stock; they produce to fill the pledges (AKA pre-orders) and their estimate of what will sell at retail. Ideas that don't make their pre-order targets would likely have failed at market and the company dodges a bullet there. Plus input from people making pledges functions as a free focus group. I used to be interested in board games and, as of a few years ago before I stopped paying attention, almost all the major publishers used Kickstarter to pre-fund most of their projects.

I actually don't have a problem with the idea of doing pre-orders, as long as the consumer gets a decent discount for putting their money up front for an unseen product. The issue I see with established companies using crowdfunding is that the system is set up for basically begging for money, with no real guaranteed return for people making pledges. That's fine for an average Joe trying to raise money, but inappropriate for a large company. Plus, the crowdfunding site takes a huge cut for being what amounts to an unneeded middleman for a large corporation. It would be more appropriate for Hasbro to just set up a pre-order system internally.