addink on 22/7/2009 at 09:19
This could work just because it's basically a scaled down version of how some projects (like independent films) are financed. Very similar to shares, only an odd way of paying dividend.
Purely in the perspective of financial investment: sure, why not. Wise investors would spread their risk and hope for the occasional hit among the misses.
However, seeing as this is the information age. We're bound to stumble into marketing, hype and lies. Leaving a lot of investors wanting on the emotional front.
A nice bonus for the developer would be that they'd have a small army of dedicated beta testers.
belboz on 22/7/2009 at 09:57
blizzard do something like that with wow, orginally wow was going to be free to play, but with the subscription method it would generate money to be used to produce game expansions and additional content, players get to beta test the new content. Although this has decended into pirates get to exploit the new content so that when it goes live they can exploit it as much as they want.
june gloom on 22/7/2009 at 12:02
WoW was supposed to be free to play? I don't buy it. Blizzard love the smell of money far more than the smell of originality or innovation. And they knew that the legions of knobgobbling fans they created from their silly faggy Warhammer 40K knockoff were a guaranteed goldmine.
steo on 22/7/2009 at 17:32
Quote Posted by dethtoll
Devil May Cry 3 is proof of this.
Care to elaborate?
june gloom on 22/7/2009 at 17:39
DMC3 US edition was specifically made harder than the Jappo version to cater to the fans. The result was an artificially difficult game that bordered the line of being cheap, crossing that line several times. Fuck DMC3.
Yakoob on 22/7/2009 at 17:55
Quote Posted by Koki
Never trust fat people.
BOOMER!
demagogue on 22/7/2009 at 20:16
Somebody mentioned Indie films and it reminds me of some films that were funded by a particular community that had a stake in the subject ... one being Shades of Ray about Pakistani-Americans (and the debut of Zachary Levi, Chuck), where all the money was raised by that particular community ... a bunch of Pakistani doctors and lawyers and friends of the family in LA that want it to succeed as a matter of community pride.
Mount & Blade was a little like that. There was a community that built around their forums, and people started taking a stake in it, especially since the dev invited people to do modifications from early on to sort of "make it their own" while not compromising the core game itself.
Those are the kind of situations where this would work best, I imagine ... The people funding it can take a kind of "ownership" interest in addition to the sales, while at the same time accepting they don't have any real say in the game itself. But they still have a faith that the developer's work will speak for them because of some kind of community connection, or trust, or whatever.
It's not a great general approach, but if your project could fit that kind of profile it could work.
The other approach I'd be curious about is benefactor games, just like wealthy individuals or organizations funding the arts, they might fund small-scale game projects as a benefactor, and that could encourage really original and quality work. For that, though, I'd think you'd need a really charismatic developer like a Dali kind of guy that could really shmooze potential benefactors and make them feel like you're really reinventing art, and make them feel like they're participating in the revolution.
All of this is for relatively small-scale stuff though. After a certain financial point, like everyone is saying, I think it just becomes unviable to expect individual donations can get you far.
