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If you are not willing to take $1000 from 50 customers who are interested in a cross platform engine, why would it be any easy to take $50K from a single individual (company or otherwise)?
I knew somebody would bring this up.  The short answer is: Contract work is very different then selling "vaporware vouchers".
With contract work you are normally dealing with a single client. The client tells you what he/she wants done and you set a price. You enter into an actual contract with this person ("I will do XYZ for the payment of $$$") so, if you've done everything right, there is no legal ambiguity.
In order to sell vaporware you have "create" (read: "make up") a list of features that is so amazing that you can attract "dev_cost/unit_price" number of clients (in your example, 50 people). The collective needs of 50 clients will be much greater then those of one. For example, I think originally we were only talking about porting the engine, not all the development tools! As somebody pointed out, it isn't trivial to port MFC code to other platforms
Add to that the uncertainty of having a "contract" with 50 clients. Do they pay up front? What happens if we only get 20 users? What if 20% of the clients don't like the finished product? Etc.
I'm taking too much time with this post as is, but I hope I've made it clear why I think contract work is much better then selling vaporware.
Again, I must point out that this is my opinion as an employee *not* as a policy maker (see my disclaimer above).
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Re-reading your question: Are you talking about 50 people pooling their money to fund a single contract? I'm not sure how that would work without getting into the whole vaporware thing, but if you could somehow convince that many people to fund a single project, then we might be able to do something with that...
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