The Bill Gates of PC gaming came up with a very weird idea lately. You see most of games are very risky investments – if some publisher likes the idea of your game (for some really odd reason) then publisher will eventually give you money for it. But as we all know most of the modern, big games don’t even come out (like for example Duke Nukem Forever etc) or are a total disasters and the whole project with millions of dollars invested in it are gone.
Now what Gabe think is funny is the idea of…the gamers (yes you!) paying for the game way before it’s even made. Here’s the exact quote:
One of the areas that I am super interested in right now is how we can do financing from the community. So right now, what typically happens is you have this budget – it needs to be huge, it has to be $10m – $30m, and it has to be all available at the beginning of the project. There’s a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative.
What I think would be much better would be if the community could finance the games. In other words, ‘Hey, I really like this idea you have. I’ll be an early investor in that and, as a result, at a later point I may make a return on that product, but I’ll also get a copy of that game.
So move financing from something that occurs between a publisher and a developer… Instead have it be something where funding is coming out of community for games and game concepts they really like.
Why put us, your customers at risk then? I know that there are millions of fan boys out there but I wonder what would happen if Valve took all their money and the project would turn out a disaster or wouldn’t even come out…
Anyway this idea is really weird (to say it nice) although it could be a good idea when you look at it from different perspective like smaller indie games or some other projects.
By the way it’s taken from the interview we posted earlier.
Source: Kotaku
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