“One of the areas that I am super interested in right now is how we can do financing from the community,”
This is what Valve chief Gabe Newell recently had to say regarding the upfront funding of new games through the fans that will eventually play them.
“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,” he said.
“There’s a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative.”
The idea, Newell says is to raise these funds from the public beforehand, which would in turn eliminate much of the risk.
“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.'”
Although it may be a good idea in principle it would certainly have to be refined before roll out. The gaming industry is wracked with piracy, to the extent that developers are intending to combat this by excluding game modes such as LAN from new titles.
In a community where publishing houses find it difficult to find loyal fans that are happy to spend R400 instead of borrowing it from a friend and cracking it online the possibility of gamers funding titles beforehand seems somewhat far-fetched.
For example, if gamers were to pay 50% of the price of the the next Call of Duty title upfront, then purchase it for half the price on release then the argument may hold some water. A mid development incentive (a game demo or description) might also go some way towards convincing fans to go for this.
The problem here would revolve, once again, around the proliferation of piracy. In such a situation the final release would undoubtedly be pirated and circulated to gamers who had nothing to do with the initial funding, leaving those who did understandably upset and disgruntled.
Nonetheless, Valve is known for its capacity to eagerly embrace new ideas, most recently with rumours of a third party generated application of Portal to the iPhone. If Gabe Newell did indeed formulate a way around the obvious obstacles associated with the argument then it may be a new way forward for gaming.
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