I would imagine it has a lot to do with if you are starting from scratch and how much outsourcing you require.
90's Arcade Racer is running on the pre-built Unity engine using the pre-built car physics plugin. So there probably isn't a lot of programming involved, just asset design. The guy working on it is obviously pretty good at 3d modeling and level design... so the work he passes off to others (who he has to pay of course) is almost non-existent. This is the SMART way to do a video game... use as many pre-existing tools as possible and do as much in-house work as possible. Of course you need time to do it this way. Either the game will take forever to do, or you'll essentially have to pay the people working on it a full salary so they can dedicate all of their time on the game and not on a "day job".
The 9AR guy didn't do this, he asked for help getting the game published, but the game was already done.
These guys want you to pay for their salary and also publish the game. This is why I don't like kickstarter btw. It's one thing to help somebody raise the funds to make something, but to pay them a salary as well.... isn't that what the sales of the product are supposed to do?
Also it doesn't look very good. This lone sentence killed any interest in the project for me:
"Road Redemption features a complex and rewarding combat system designed, from the ground up, to offer a great experience on mouse and keyboard."
If you are trying to make a racing game, or any action game really, that has controls based around the mouse and keyboard, you obviously don't know anything about video games or what makes them fun. There is a reason I still hang around here after all of these years and why I helped SirP with the controls.dat project for many of them. The interface is the single most important part of a game.
While the mouse can make a decent gaming controller, the keyboard makes a horrible one. It's digital, it has speed and ghosting issues, it's poorly laid out, and it was never designed for games in mind. This is why FPS blew up as soon as they started appearing on consoles, because you finally had a controller that was simple, ergonomic and efficient.
An I know some fps nuts are going to chime in about how a mouse/keyboard is superior or better. They'd be wrong on that, but they can rant about it. Like many things, the keyboard mouse combo was made out of necessity and nothing more. In pc gaming's infancy you just didn't have viable gaming controllers. The game port on allowed for a maximum of 4 buttons and anything other than that required convoluted drivers that may or may not work with your game and a rather expensive controller. So if you made a pc game, it needed to work with the mouse and keyboard simply because pc users probably weren't going to have anything else. Today though the fact that a 360 controller "just works" on the pc has changed all of that and it is evident by the fact that nearly every AAA pc gaming title today has gamepad support.
They say that gamepads will be supported as well, but the fact that they mention so boldly that it's based around the mouse/keyboard first is a big warning sign to me that they are the dreaded "pc gamer" instead of just gamers, which are a bit more flexible in their philosophy.
Sorry to rant, but when a group doesn't get it, it ticks me off a little.
Sorry, sorry, I went a little off topic there.
But to answer your question, it think they are a little wasteful on their spending. All of the vehicles and terrain seem really simple and generic and since Unity is more of a scripting engine than anything else, their team seems really bloated for what they are trying to do. I mean I get it, you and all your buddies want to make a video game, but perhaps you don't need all of your buddies on the payroll.