Kickstarter vs Distributor - What's the Difference?

A distributor is an agent who will take products and sell them to a bunch of stores. On Kickstarter, the risk was if I send 2000 games to a fulfillment center in Australia, and they decide not to ship those games or they don't package them well. Now that's no longer the risk. The risk now is more that I spend a lot of money up front to make a game and no one wants that game. So it's a different type of risk, but I prefer the latter because I feel like I have a little bit more control now than I did on Kickstarter.