Gabe Newell has offered another of his interesting ideas. How about gamers fund the development of games? Sounds odd? Well, it might be clever for a couple of reasons.
Speaking to ABC’s Good Game show, Newell put forth the idea that the $10 to $30 million that’s traditionally invested in games could come from the audience who’s likely to buy it. Investing at this stage, he points out, could even make you a profit.
Kotaku spotted this one, and since they’ve, um, borrowed the photo I took of him, I’ll borrow their hard work transcribing the quote! During the interview on ABC’s site Gabe explains that investing up to $30m has a huge risk involved, and one that’s increasingly difficult to take as the world continues to squirt all its money into the sky.
“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.”
This doesn’t mean this is exactly what Valve are going to do, but rather it’s Newell throwing an idea out there. But it’s an interesting one. First of all, it means gamers would be picking games they thought worthy (who wouldn’t back a new 2D BOY project, or want to support a Tim Schafer game? (if he sodding released it on PC)). And secondly, and indeed relatedly, it does away with the need for publishers – something some developers might rather enjoy.
It’s a novel idea. So what RPS wants to know is, what game would you most want to invest in? Which developer, or which game idea, would you throw your money behind to make it happen?
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Mount & Blade wasn’t anything like an “investment”. I mean, I bought it at the same time as I bought Flash Crawl I think, I didn’t follow the development at all, and I probably played more of Flash Crawl that I did M&B, but where is the returns on my “investment” now? Where is the XBox 360 version that I would surely have wanted my investment to fund? I mean, I want to play that glorious game on my other “investment” (*cough* a 8′ hdmi home theater screen *cough* I told my wife that I’d see returns on this as well!)
Yes, the game was financed by early adopters, and thats cool and all, but this isn’t what Newell is talking about at all. Did M&B raise anything close to 10~30 millions? Would that model work for anything else than “unique” game like M&B?
The only way that Newell’s idea would work is with a “broker” of game. Probably Steam in this case. So you select a few games, “invest” an amount in them, but it stays an investment, like the stock market. You do no get to recoup it if the game sucks/doesn’t sell. You do not get your money back if the company goes under. You know, like a real investor.
It would be a gamble, pushing you to “bet” on game that will go mainstream, not necessarily games that you want to play. Case in point, most suggestions here are sequels (requiring hefty licenses fee/IP rights) or ideas that would never see a return on your investment. There is a difference between funding games and making the game industry your own personal bitch.
Hell, the first Evil Dead film had a $500 budget, all of which was from investors.
Pretty much every industry has done something like this to fund projects/product, it’s nothing new. I’m surprised it
“How many of those “Donate Here” buttons have you clicked on in the last, oh, say two years? Even though you are using the author’s product? I rest my case.”
I’ve always thought it would be a good idea to bring up a donation box, as you download a game/album/book that the authors/developers/musicians put up for free website. People are a lot less likely to shrug it off, when they’ve been, for lack of a better word, called out.
Well, it was about £90,000, and gained from small businesses looking for a return on investment, rather than horror fans looking for a cool movie. But you are right, it is nothing new. Venture capital is this model writ large.
I’m also in the camp of being terrified of entitled game fans getting more entitled.
$90,000
If Mr Newell is floating the idea then I’d bet Valve are thinking about doing it providing it doesn’t get laughed out of court. After all they’re well geared up for it as it would be fairly trivial to use Steam as a mechanism to find out how popular a given idea would be then collect the funding and, if necessary, refund if they didn’t hit the target.
Consider if they’d gone that route with L4D2 and told people their ideas and said it’s too much work for free DLC but if enough of you cough up £20 we’ll get to work. Would have avoided a lot of the crap they got thrown at them.
As a means of financing it’s already quite well established in the music world, quite a few groups/singers invite fans to buy the next album in advance and once they’ve got the capital hire a studio and so on so I can’t see why it couldn’t work here. Though the suggestion that early investors could later share in profits makes it more interesting. Effectively you’d be buying an IOU for a game with a potential return on capital. Pretty soon some financial wizard will start bundling up packages of such shares and start selling them to investors who aren’t interested in the games per se. The market will boom for a while until the day comes that some investor actually gets round to getting his triple A bundle valued and finds the 999 shares in Duke Nukem Forever and 1 share of Sims 5 isn’t worth quite as solid a deal as he thought. Credit crunch 2 – this time it’s virtual.
I’m sure I’m late, but… tyranny of the majority?
The idea of getting rid of publishers makes my blackened heart swell up with joy, but I don’t know how plausible this actually is. There’s a list of problems that are obvious right off the bat:
1. How much control do the investors have over the direction of the game? Ideally, it would be none, but in reality, he who holds the gold makes the rules.
2. What about the games that never actually get released? The vast majority of games that start development never finish, for a variety of reasons. The design might sound good on paper but not work in practice, the technology might run completely off the rails, key people might quit the studio, etc.
How many times would community investors be willing to get burned before they gave up on the idea altogether?
3. What happens when the game runs over-budget (as they so often do)? Does the studio go back to the community and ask for more money?
It would be interesting to see this tried out on a small scale. I don’t think funding the next Half-Life this way is realistic, but I could see it being used for a smaller-scale game like World of Goo or Braid. After all, raising $180K is a lot more reasonable than trying to raise $30M.
I like the idea in principle, but I think it would devolve quickly into a quagmire.
You know how entitled we all tend to be about games that haven’t come out yet and upon which we haven’t yet spent any coin? Just imagine the levels of entitlement that would come with game investment.
The success (at least perceived success, I don’t know about the financials of it) of the M&B model may cast some doubt on my concerns, but perhaps it was that we were buying a beta on the cheap and not buying ownership in the game that makes the difference.
I just though of this : http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/
Although it’s not a game, it’s “Community funded” by the early adopters and betas. If you read the history though, you’ll quickly realize that betas are far and few between, and that the elusive 1.0 release has been promised for years.
The M&B model doesn’t work. IMHO, M&B was a fluke
@Gutter – given that Cliffski is cross-promoting with another game using the M&B model (Overgrowth), and a lot of people are enjoying what they’ve played so far of Cortex Command (also using the same model), I’m not sure how it’s a fluke.
I can see this working, but with high levels of management involved. First you’d need a contract for each level of investment and for each investor: similar “contracts” are agreed to every day: it’s called privacy policies tied with registrations. So you now need a range of contracts that cover different amounts of invested money. $1-5, $6-10, $11-15, etc. etc. 1 to 5 dollar investments sound worthless, but they are often more doable for a larger amount of people than a minimum 20 dollars, which is the price of dinner for two, half that of a game, and double that of a movie ticket. Each investment level would have a percentage of returns ($1-5 garnering a return of 0.1% which would be made to look favorable by showing 0.1% of a large number, like $100,000, resulting in $100), minimum return being the middle of the investment level ($1-5 would have a minimum return of 2.5 dollars) to avoid outright bankrupting the developers involved while on average, paying people more than they are putting in. However, this isn’t quite fare to those who put in 5 dollars at the top of the investment level, and that would suck, particularly for the high investment levels in the thousands, but investment is a given risk to begin with.
Most users (short of major investors- tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, publishers probably) would be allocated the ability to reply to threads in a development forum and start one thread in that forum for themselves which they can lock or unlock to non-developer commentary, effectively making them semi-moderators of their own single threads, just without the power to lock out or delete the posts of the developers who would have universal forum privileges. If a company ignores most of it’s investors, they will not be invested in as highly. If they comply to their every whim, the game will never get released and they’ll have to shell out some amount of money to the investors as they were assured in their contracts.
Investment would also mean access to open source alphas and betas, potentially even release candidates (investment level $20-25 and beyond), under a non-disclosure contract to avoid the theft of data. If the data is copied by a third party, say, pirates, or another company, then problems can ensue if the leak is not easily identifiable, and often, it’s not. Hence the release candidate status as (potentially) to avoid massive data theft. Alpha theft is potentially dangerous if copyrights haven’t been established, but that would be a developer oversight, still a problem, and one that you could enter court over; copyrights are just records of who owns what idea as of what date till what date they will not, intellectual property is a given to all creators, but proving you came up with it is the hard part. The poor man’s copyright is a postage time stamp on a sealed letter or container that holds the information inside.
I’d invest in a Dominions 4. That would be amazing.
Chief Wyrmskin supports this suggestion. It’s good that Gabe Newell has finally said something sensible after two months of saying utterly ridiculous things concerning the robbery that was Left 4 Dead and it’s DLC being sold as a full sequel, with the full and uncritical support of games journos. No offence, but the Left 4 Dead boycott group continues to hold the moral high ground and the argument.
PC games could be sold for the same price as console ones, except that they absolutely can’t. PC gamers are far more picky consumers than other platform users generally and they will be far more powerful investors.
I also don’t buy the argument that this would at all turn games development into a power of the majority and compromise artistic integrity for developers. Those that latch on to a game the earliest are those most loyal to it’s original concept, like Warhammer being a real PvP MMO and Left 4 Dead being a full game where Versus was actually the Campaign rather than an after-thought(Valve for some reason were actually surprised that Versus was the most popular mode even though that is the strength the game was originally hyped upon as a Turtle Rock project).
Games ARE influenced by fickle majority fan-bases. What investment does it get rid of fickle majority fan-bases that change games into something different from the original premise. The oldest and loyalist potential player-base is given back the power and helps take the unwanted influence off the developer.
The idiot faux fan-base that turns games into slush will have to put their money on the line if they want to have the same say as those who just wanted the game to be how the developer originally said it would be.
And turn the public into an excuse for the state of market? eh.
I fear the day the people who post on forums have the monetary say in the development process. I dread it because the poor developer would have so many different people talking in their ear, trying to make their own game. How many “I want vehicles” threads do you see on the CoD 4 boards? Gamers could never be trusted with protecting a property. They would destroy it from the inside and most likely with gusto. Too many voices at once, with an actual reason to meddle.
If bound by contract not to meddle in the development process, only to hold the developer to the pitched idea… well that would actually be a good thing. Something I would partake in, because I think for every game that you invested in that saw the light of day, you would see one that did.
The thing is, the devs are are making the games I want to see already, because they are gamers like us. And on top of it, they know what they are doing more than we ever could. I would only like to see devs quit fiddling or being pushed to hard by developers. I blame the likes of far cry 2 and the end of duke nukem forever on them. Especially seeing how microsoft pushed psychonauts around and how seeing the better games coming from the more independent developers. I want to see the publishers turned more into distributers than game developers, but I don’t think this is the way to do it.
Then gamers would quickly realize that many of the features and options they demand actually make the game more of a turd mind then a gold mine. Also it would be their gold turning into turd. I don’t think the gaming community is up for that level of reality.
Games need to become the price of DVD’s. And have more freedom then the pirate version not the other way around. The original xbox and its modifications comes to mind. My xbox and games came alive after i modded. I could use cheats and trainers play movies etc etc.. Many features which probably would not have been included in the 360 and ps3.
@Dominic White : I stand corrected. Although I am certain what Newell wasn’t speaking about that kind of system at all.
I still say that a stock market like system would work best, if we are thinking about investments rather than encouragements.
well valve isn’t the one that actually needs money. if they actually cared about how much developers make they might want to stop acting like distributing a game actually costs 40% of its price.
the devs that need money are the ones who’ll have to put out the request like, “please invest in our game. you will get your money back and a free copy if we actually manage to release it” and nobody is going to give them anything.
i think a better model is to have a publishing company that actually gives a damn about game development, and then have people invest in that company.
Amusingly, Flayra from Unknown Worlds heard about this interview and responded, “We HAVE been funded like that!”
http://twitter.com/NS2/status/2761475103
“I would invest in a Blade Runner/Syndicate/Deus Ex mix. The overall look and atmosphere of the Blade Runner game/movie, the initial game idea of Syndicate (”Go out and kill this person”/”Steal this item”/”Wreak havoc”) and the freedom of Deus Ex of how to accomplish my goal.
So, where can I send my money?”
Do I have a second account and amnesia? Because that is word for word what I would want.
Yes yes and yes.
Skepticism aside, this could be a wonderful idea. Of course, without the “fans can demand gameplay changes” part…
Am I the only one who sees this as opening the door for a video game Ponzi scheme or whatchacallit of sorts?
Think about it — Bernie Madoff game dev equivalent starts asking for investments for their product, advertising with pretty (and faked) videos on the Internet and encouraging-looking statistics for those whose interests they pique. They set up a several year-long operation duringwhich time they look a bit like Duke Nukem Forever or any of those long and arduous gaming projects whose fanbase gets really passionate and defensive for — except that this fanbase actually donates money on a regular basis. After X number of years of providing fake content updates and other development tidbits (surely relatively easy to fake), the studio closes down, running off with all the cash.
It’s diabolical, really.
Loom 2.
It’s an interesting idea, but the main difference is that publishers/investors usually have a great deal of insider information from the very beginning of the project. The game is pitched to them and the developers have to answer to any of their concerns.
Consumers, on the other hand, are generally only informed of a project long after the point of no return, and are kept in the dark about most aspects of development, only getting some teaser trailers and marketing-speak.
So for this public funding to work, it would need to either bare all from the very outset and operate in a completely transparent manner, or the consumer-investors would have to place an awful lot of trust in the developers. But it’s impossible for the developers to please everyone who invests in the game, even if it end up as a commercial success (not to mention the ones that don’t).
So I don’t think this system would work well for larger, AAA titles unless the developer was very reliable and consistent with their games. As people have mentioned, though, smaller indie games could do very well with consumer funding.
check out the good game website for a twenty minute interview with mr Newell, its pretty cool.
The way I think of it is that money is like votes in a capitalist economy. If you buy environmentally-friendly products, you’re voting for the company to become greener. If you donate to a developer, you’re voting for them to make games.
For almost its entire development Mount&Blade had a working build available to those who paid for it early on.
This 1) proved that progress was being made, and
2) created a natural pool of testers for the game.
Many games suffer from not getting enough testing before release. M&B was tested more than some AAA titles, and people paid them for the privilege to do so.
Paying to “invest” in a game implies the wrong kind of relationship between developers and players. But it isn’t a “donation” either.
At best, it becomes a social contract. I pay the developer of a game I am interested in, and in return they show me what’s going on and I get to be part of the club. I give it a look and offer feedback whenever a new build is released.
When the game is officially released, I get my copy for only the $10, $15, or $20 that I initially paid— that’s the return on the investment, not some payout scheme. The wealth is the whole experience and getting games tailor-made to my interests, not playing venture capitalist.
The system lends itself to transparency and creates a much more honest relationship between gamer and developer, where the expectations are kept in check. If the game shows promise, it will accrue interest. If the game is a pantload, word will spread and the game will flounder and die.
What happened with Mount&Blade wasn’t a fluke– they just did a really good job with the hand they were dealt. This doesn’t mean it can’t go horribly wrong, but it does show that it’s a workable system.
I’ve bought Mount & Blade and Cortex Command along those lines, paying early and less but getting an unfinished version of a very promising game. I’d say it’s worked out very well so far for me, both games have seen major improvements and active, involved communities that provide lots of new content.
Some games you just want to help for the hell of it though. I’ve probably sunk literally months of joyous hours into Dwarf Fortress, and I like to float them a few bucks whenever I have a chance to support its development. That game is the perfect mixture of substance and hype, I get a great game now and an even greater game later, so it’s worth it.
So I’d have to say, it takes a really great game idea to convince people to invest in you. In that case, we the gamers win. We get our excellent niche titles, and we foster true indie developers.
It’s an interesting idea and possibly a plasuible strategy for indie and very small-scale developers, but for bigger games I’d imagine its a bit unfeasible; you couldn’t possibly know your budget in advance so you couldn’t know how many programmers/artists you could afford to support and at what wages, over what period. Hence you couldn’t know what features etc. you could afford to include and thus it’d be pretty much impossible to actually design the game in the first place. Its better to know you have no development money than to know that you might possibly have some at some point maybe. All I see actually happening here is people excitedly throwing in their money at the start only to have it fizzle out and for everybody to end up with nothing to show for it. But then I’m a horrible cynical troll-boy who lives beneath a bridge and yells at cows.
@Radicand — I agree that supporting a AAA budget with this system would at least require some changes. You’d need another source of income or at least a large initial investment of capital to support development long enough for money from Alpha-buyers to become substantial. Or you’d need to have an early pitch with a skeleton crew working on the game until its generated a critical mass of money and interest to start full production.
And yes, I realize that last approach has a huge potential for scamming, but I’m throwing it out there anyway.
They’re floating it in accordance with the new industry trend of seeing just how much shit they can get away with before someone starts picking things apart. Thanks to critical powerhouses like John here, they’ve already snuck under the radar with charging for access to betas, so this is just a way of finally going all in.
HAY GUYS, DUZ TAHT SOUND GUD? POST IN TEH COMMENTS PLZ, NEED MORE ADVIEWS FOR OBNOXIOUS AND COMPLETELY IRRELIVANT ADS THAT SOMEHOW DON’T PROVE THE EXACT CORRELATION BETWEEN ADBLOCK AND THE DECREASE IN AD REVENUE HUR HUR I AM GAMMING JURNALIIST
So yeah. I can totally see how a company that’s cynically made most of its bank by milking its own titles to death and squeezing cybercafes and owns the biggest digital distribution portal — from which it takes even more unearned money from the publishers who use the service to overcharge us — would start to think that maybe gamers themselves need to start funding these $30m titles. Because even though everyone goes on and on about how much of a risk it is for them to fund that bullshit, they’d rather continue to push the rest of the burden onto their market instead of, you know, not spending $30m on what amounts to an engine and marketing. It’s hard to recoup the $30m from sales of a finished product? Oh, well, surely it’s going to be easier to get it up front from the exact same people, sight unseen. This totally makes sense, and i can see exactly why he thought it had enough merit to say in public.
And you know what? It’s a perfect match for STEAM, too. What would be better than paying full price for a version of a game that Valve claims we do not actually own in their cockjab EULA? Funding it ourselves.
In terms of having too many chefs in the kitchen though, i’m finding it hard to understand how that became a main concern. Valve themselves spewed all over their commentary tracks for the HL2 series how plenty of their completely moronic design decisions came from the polling of testers apparently comprised of milksops, hobos, and MMO players. In the wider picture you still get meddling from management doofs and publishers. No real change, and given the behavior, rationale, and practices of most publishers, i’m not convinced there would be a bigger clusterfuck if an analogue to NMA were calling the shots instead.
The one real benefit this laughably absurd idea would have is that for once devs might finally have to answer to people who actually play videogames. We might be able to dictate that more funding should go to hiring an actual writer instead of another engine programmer. Or an actual game designer instead of another engine programmer. Or an actual artist instead of Cliffy B’s even gayer “cousin” (5 times removed, so it’s ok…)
Don’t see it working if it means communities stepping in as a publisher; they can’t compel accountability, nor do they have a clear voice, nor should they be given the illusion of ownership.
Games being incrementally revised and improved, and funded through donations by a community has worked, but only for games that are fundamentally about the gameplay. You’re not going to play through 18 reiterations of the same linear 10 hour corridor shooter, so if you want a good experience, you wait till it’s done.
Still, even studios that make games that don’t benefit from tinkering can supplement sales with donations.
@Jon
It’s okay. You’re safe now. Take a long, deep breath, put down the knife… Show us here on this doll where Gabe Newell touched you.
Dear god, man. You have anger issues. Like, clinical.
srsly, he can go fuck himself.
(enter a large rant that is better homed at a blog)
key points:
a) developer doesn’t want to spend as much money
b) mod scene seems quite lively
c) ??????
d) win
I think it’s funny you mention 2DBoy when they basically already did this to fund World of Goo. They offered it for “pre-order” along with the first episode, and this was avaliable a [i]significant[/i] amount of time before it released. During which time I assume they were making the rest of the game. I remember pre-ordering it in February of last year and then being pleasantly surprised with a download link some however many months later.
This is dumb. We get to take the risk as uninformed investors during the process, unable to coherently enforce milestones, double check profit and loss reports, and we still get to pay for the game. This is ripe for all kinds of shenanigans from developers and/or publishers. MMOs and Microtransactions is more than enough consumer abuse thank you very much.
@ Jon R.
I’m genuinely curious about what gaming companies/experiences have aggrieved you so? You’ve touched base on Steam, but could you elaborate more on this?
Which developer, or which game idea, would you throw your money behind to make it happen?
Myst Online: Uru Live
Given the chance/choice where would I invest some money?
2D Boy
ACE Team
Bit Blot
Bohemia Interactive
Flashbang Studios
Introversion Software
Number None
TaleWorlds
or
Ubisoft
THQ
Take Two
Microsoft
EPIC
EA
EIDOS
On the one hand you have games and people you want to support, but who are a far higher risk financially speaking.
On the other are some massive, soul-less and faceless mega-corporations, who while having produced some great games, and containing within them some great development teams, have also behaved like complete arseholes at various times. The financial risk is harder to assess – while they will bring in lots of revenue they also have lots of costs. You would also need to buy shares that have the risk/return factor already priced ino them. At this level you might as well just choose FTSE or NASDAC shares purely on investment grounds regardless of any connection with game development.
It is interesting to see if any new independent developers/games arise in the aftermath of the lay-offs and cancellations by the big developers…
(from wikipedia: “On November 7, 2005, Take-Two Interactive announced that it was acquiring Firaxis. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed, but according to the SEC filing it amounted for USD$26.7 million in cash, stock, and development advances, with almost $11.3 million of that figure coming in the form of possible considerations based on future product sales.” >>> does this mean for $30 million we could have bought Firaxis and got them to making a new Alpha Centaurii instead of the console version of Civ?
Reading all these comments makes me kinda sick.
There are so many “interesting” statements, like the “micro investors wouldnt work, they would need to be syndicated!”, what about countries then, they dont work ?
And direct funding wouldnt really change anything but the amount of money we are putting in a game and the quality of the game. The games would be a lot cheaper to buy and we would have a more direct say in the game development.
And as some say “it would be mayhem” and “a full asylum of fans” ffs, the whole worlds an asylum, so shut it. There are perfectly good ways to get to know the micro investors via complex polls etc.
And the so called micro investors would syndicate naturally like in real life. Someone would put forth a concept and people would support that or not and offer their own ideas upon that concept. You can even look at it as a huge tree graph as you progress through development there are “branches”(concepts) to choose from and continue to develope those, each one would have a price tag etc.
So for the closure – the publishers must go or change their perspective on game development. The main flaw is that the publisher wants to make money, the developer and the end customer just want a great game. So its pretty obvious who is the fifth wheel.
Plus for the funding, do they eat money ? Lets say we have a 1000 person studio where everybody got payed 200$ per day, every day, even weekends. that would be 200*1000= 200 000$ per day so if at least 0,003 percent of the people on earth would give the, like 1 dollar a day that would cover that budget. And we can go on from there if at least 1 percent of the population could fund more than 100+ EA s. And these are just rough estimates. 1 percent of the population donating 1$ per day would come to 67 million $ per day, make it one cent that would be 670 000$ per day.
Any comments on that ?
“Any comments on that ?”
Apply same argument to charities, third world aid, medical research…
Angry or not, Jon R. makes a lot of sense actually.
EtsSpets: See my comment, it’s the longest one, or close to it
I just want to point out that this isn’t new:
http://www.zombieexperiment.com/zombie/
That one has been going on for a while now. I think they were actually in talks with Vale at some point so this sort of tarnishes my respect for Valve some.
Count me in, Mr Newell. Just to see the some commenters here inflate with rage at their inability to call expectant yet critical gamers “angry entitled brat” anymore.
This funding model works on a much smaller scale in the “indie press” [non-computer] roleplaying game market. Subscriber-funded development was happening in the 90s there with the Glorantha Trade Association and some current indie (non-computer] game developers use it to good effect.
The “ransom model” is also popular with some, but I am not sure if that would work as well for larger computer game projects – smaller ones might be ideally suited to it though?
I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Margaret
http://grantfoundation.net