It was "announced" there, if you can call it that, by which I mean it was mentioned it in the Sci-Fi forums. One can debate whether it was the lack of exposure the Kickstarter had (although it was a couple years ago, so that might be why you missed it) or lack of manuscript that killed it, but even with far more exposure I suspect it would have failed because of the latter; Mike was simply asking people to give him $25,000 with a vague promise of eventually delivering something.
I had never heard of Kickstarter until Romain told me about it, and I never looked closely at it until more recently. The thing about books and even video games going through kickstarter is that you are basically pledging to pay someone's wages be it the artists, the coders or the writer. A physical product requires non-artistic, technical skills and material costs, with the latter being more significant and a per
unit basis.
Matt Forebeck's analysis seems solid: plastic minatures have similar economies of scale to information products such as books and computer games, but also retain some marginal utility of actually owning multiple copies. An individual does not need two copies of a computer game or a book, although NYX is offering two copies of
LOS on different formats if you want one for your PC and one for your phone or tablet. With miniatures, the more the merrier! Who doesn't want a bigger army?