Thought the exact same thing! I clicked to read about new developments funded for Clang the compiler and was wondering why I haven't heard of the fundraising effort...
Well, I honestly don't think Clang needs fundraising through KickStarter :) Apple's $100B+ should be enough. GCC is now deprecated on Apple platforms and will be completely replaced by LLVM family in a year's time, so their whole ecosystem (OS X, iOS, cloud infrastructures) depends on LLVM and certainly they would spend as much as necessary on it.
I pledged for this Kickstarter even though I'm not overly interested in realistic sword fighting video games. I really just wanted to give something back to Neal Stephenson for all the enjoyment I've gotten out of his books aside from his cut of their purchase price. Helping a pet project of his succeed seemed like a cool way to do that.
However, this Kickstarter really struggled to get funded which surprised me, especially given Neal's "nerd fame" as he calls it. Maybe this is why the AAA title companies haven't taken a stab at something like this, because the interest just isn't there?
I pledged for pretty much the same reasons, even though I'm not overly keen on a sword fighting console game. Perhaps you're right and that there's just not enough interest.
