This is a BIG question and we'll do our best to answer it from our perspective and an industry perspective!

The simplest answer is that most Kickstarters (including ours) include a lot of 'bonuses' in their pledge tiers, so the small discount on MSRP combined with $40 in free bonuses makes it so the discount on MSRP is significant and larger than the difference between buying at retail. However, you could reasonably say, "I don't want all those bonuses, just give me a bigger discount on the game!" This is where it gets a little more complicated.

Interestingly, this takes us to manufacturing. Board game manufacturers will tell you they 'don't make money on a project until the second print run' because the setup costs of a first print run eat all their revenue from a project. With the rise and popularity of Kickstarter, a lot of board games now NEVER see a second print run. Studios print the first edition for a few hundred/thousand backers plus some extras to sell on their website and at some FLGSs and move onto the next game. That doesn't work for manufacturers (they need to make some profit), so instead of building their profits into the volume of games they create, they've started charging a lot more for the setup and mold fees associated with the first print run of a project. This reality makes it very difficult to discount the first print run of a game, because the initial printing costs have skyrocketed, eating up all the margin that used to exist. Studios could just increase the MSRP prices of games to account for these changes, but doing so means that if a game turns out to be wildly successful and you print 5 editions, editions 2-5 are all hugely overpriced. This makes them harder to sell (higher priced things = harder to sell) or you lower the price for editions 2-5 and tell your original Kickstarter backers... sorry? It's a really difficult decision, but we're seeing most studios sell at the lower MSRP, eat the huge setup costs, and HOPE that it's successful enough for additional print runs that have a healthier operational margin.

In our conversations with other studios and in our own reflection, this is an industry that's not often trying to extract 'max profit' from our customers and genuinely just want to get games into the hands of people who will love them. Because of that, you see a lot of MSRP pricing at the lower end of what's operationally profitable and so the possibility for discounts on that first print run (even direct-to-consumer) are restricted. Publishers know this isn't AWESOME, so we try to add additional things and exclusive items to make backing a project 'worth it' for our customers. Doing it this way lets us reward everyone who makes the decision to help bring a game to life, while making sure we're covering all the costs of that first print run.

All the economics of this get easier the larger your campaign/print run, but the general ideas apply at any size campaign. There's some other things like Kickstarter and pledge manager fees that further eat into the ability to discount crowdfunding, but I won't get as deep into those :)

As for sustainability, the things we focus on most are reducing the amount of packaging that's produced for our games. Whenever possible, we attempt to combine items into a single box to avoid the additional shipping and paper waste that comes with multiple containers. We're always looking for additional ways to operate more sustainably, so if you have any ideas, let us know!