By John Walker on July 21st, 2009 at 10:31 am.
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?
21/07/2009 at 10:36 c-Row says:
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?
21/07/2009 at 10:38 gulag says:
Sean Cooper
21/07/2009 at 10:46 MedO says:
So what he says is, we should move the risk of maybe producing a crappy game from the developer to the customer. Sounds really good put that way, doesn’t it?
21/07/2009 at 10:47 Ian says:
As long as it didn’t go into MyFootballClub territory. I’d rather leave the important decisions to the devs.
21/07/2009 at 10:48 Stupid Fat Hobbit says:
The Kotaku piece goes on to suggest that people who invest in a game in this way would get a say in the development process, which would be a terrible idea. What self respecting developer would agree to change his game design based on a popular vote? That’s not what Newell seems to be suggesting himself, though.
Also, I wonder how much he’s be looking for each investor to contribute. Would it be something close to the retail cost of the game (more of a long-term preorder), or in the region of hundreds or thousands of dollars?
21/07/2009 at 10:48 Lobotomist says:
Public funding for games ?
You mean like L4D ?
21/07/2009 at 10:48 Aphotique says:
Does the developer have to be current? If not, Black Isle Studios. Else, Obsidian and BioWare for obvious reasons.
Game idea? New Planescape: Torment, or an mmo that faithfully follows the UO formula…but looks like Aion. XD
21/07/2009 at 10:52 Serenegoose says:
Well, sounds interesting, if a gamble. I’d not like it to become standard though. I’m happier for big publishers to take duke nukem forever sized risks for no return, you know? Sure it’d only be like £60 (random figure pulled out of nowhere, I’m sure it would be anywhere between 1p and individual choice) of my money, but hells, I need that for real products I’ll get the moment I hand cash over.
Or am I missing what he’s saying?
21/07/2009 at 10:53 Jayt says:
Yeah I watch good game regulary and saw this. I just want L4D2 to be released so they can start talking about the real games I want to hear about (hl, portal etc)
21/07/2009 at 10:55 jon_hill987 says:
I’ll invest in almost anything if it will stop Microsoft molesting the game in question. Delaying stuff on PC so their X-Box looks better, forcing GFWL on us despite it being quite possibly the worst designed piece of software I have ever used. If it can put publishers out of the question it would give studios more creative freedom and could only be a good thing.
21/07/2009 at 10:57 Pags says:
Didn’t Mount & Blade already do this?
21/07/2009 at 10:59 TauQuebb says:
Dwarf Fortress is being developed on donations alone and imo is one of the most in-depth games I have ever played.
21/07/2009 at 11:01 Radiant says:
Thing is a lot of publishers are good for developers.
I know there is an atmosphere of them vs us between the two but a lot of developers do need to be reigned in a little and have their games subjected to stringent testing to polish out the ‘obvious’ flaws.
If someone like Peter Molyneux tried to accomplish everything he said about one of his games, with no one to answer to, he’d spend billions of pounds and we’d never see the bloody thing.
And if it was public funding it’d be a billion pounds of our money and we’d have no say in the matter.
“It’s done when it’s done” is all fun and games when it’s other peoples money.
21/07/2009 at 11:04 Radiant says:
But yeah I would like a hundred grand to make a game I call ‘Fuck Simulator’.
It’s a potential franchise and I need to do a bit of research.
21/07/2009 at 11:05 Gap Gen says:
Interesting notion. I’ve donated to small developers before, but only in small amounts, and without expecting a return on my investment other than getting more games in the future.
One problem is if the community feel as investors that they have a creative say in the game’s design. This could be a bad thing, potentially.
21/07/2009 at 11:06 Patrick says:
a RTT like Harpoon, but better. So lots of realism, moddable and for the sales figures: 3D :)
21/07/2009 at 11:07 Hermit says:
It’s an interesting approach. Seems like the sort of finance plan that could benefit a lot of indie devs.
Your main difficulty would be finding the investors, though. You’d probably need to be a fairly established outfit, since you’re essentially relying on having an established community to rely on. I expect people would be much happier investing in 2DBoy’s next project as opposed to an entirely new developer with nothing more than a spoon and a dream.
That said, it’s a system that can work. There’s independant films out there that have successfully used this sort of model.
21/07/2009 at 11:07 W.Yutani says:
It’s a good idea in theory, but It does assume that each game you invests in actually a) get finnished and b) is any good.
The increasing frequency that studios are getting merged, dropped and bought-out at the moment means that your beloved game you’ve invested in could easy get shelved or dropped. Or as Stupid Fat Hobbit suggested, what if you feel like a second rate job has been done on your investment – games forums are full enough of whiners as it is, let alone adding money into the equation.
It is a nice idea, but I can’t se it working in reality. (plus how irritated would you be if you’d pre-payed your £30 into Brutal Legend, only to discover you now have to go out and buy an XBox just to play it) – sorry a bit of a negative post there.
21/07/2009 at 11:08 negativedge says:
The problem with this is investors generally get to have a say in how a company operates. In this case, that would mean we’d get gamers telling developers how to make games. And gamers are idiots.
This can almost work with very small titles with dedicated, open fanbases, but anything large (ie, what Gabe is actually talking about) is a disaster waiting to happen. And who gets to hold the developers accountable? Most studios don’t get to go all Ion Storm on a publisher because there is something visible, solid, and intimidating to answer to. You don’t fuck with your breadwinner. But if the cash is coming from ten thousand different average joe’s? Who cares if they lose their money – what are they going to do about it?
21/07/2009 at 11:09 Sinnerman says:
I suppose that if Julian Gollop needed money for the next Chaos or Laser Squad I might think about it. As long as it had a decent single player mode and wasn’t an RTS.
I download a fair number of free indie games. I wonder what I would do if I really loved one of them and they said it was only a prototype and they needed to raise money for the final product. I’m guessing that for most indie games there would not be that many people interested at that point and I would have to give a lot more than the cost of a game for it to make a difference.
21/07/2009 at 11:10 negativedge says:
This essentially happens with many indie titles anyway. When they put up that preorder page on their game’s website, they aren’t doing it because they like you. They’re doing it because they need the money. And then there’s the recent Telltale Monkey Island fiasco, where you are in fact forced to pay for something that doesn’t exist.
21/07/2009 at 11:18 Hermit says:
@NegativeEdge
I found it amusing that many people took Telltale to task over that one, yet a lot of those people could also be found in the Natural Selection 2 pre-order thread saying “Woop, preordered my special edition!”
The fact that preorders are a pretty popular option with a game’s core audience is perhaps indicative that gamers are only too happy to hand over money early. Even better if that money goes direct to the devs and helps ensure the title is finished, rather than to a retail outlet like Amazon or HMV.
21/07/2009 at 11:21 Slippery Jim says:
This would be a great idea! Then people could enjoy more games that are new and innovative, rather than mainstream and formulaic.
21/07/2009 at 11:21 Radiant says:
I like how no one has brought up that we already fund game development by, you know, actually buying games.
21/07/2009 at 11:24 RobF says:
I’ll happily undercut Radiant if anyone wants Fuck Simulator – £2.50 and a packet of Rolos and I’m yours.
21/07/2009 at 11:25 Sinnerman says:
@negativedge; I was thinking more of a different budget level and point in the process. Someone makes a free game in their spare time and it gets some positive feedback. Say they didn’t have any savings and had a mortgage to pay off, how would they make the decision that it was an acceptable risk to work on the game full time and pay for things like professional artists, musicians and voice acting.
21/07/2009 at 11:26 Pidesco says:
What the gaming industry needs are private, big money investors who invest in game developers, not because it’s their business, but because they see it as an artistic endeavour worth supporting, like painting, or film.
21/07/2009 at 11:27 Optimaximal says:
The thing is, if enough PC owners invested in it (which is most likely, since the majority of Schafer’s built-in user-base was the PC-crowd until his miss-chosen words offended the AIM) then the PC would be the lead platform…
The shareholder who speaks loudest gets the biggest say, after all.
21/07/2009 at 11:31 LionsPhil says:
Jesus. So you people want to move from executive meddling from a few publishers to executive meddling from a whole asylumload of fans? At least the former have a chance of having a consistent opinion.
The mental image you have here should be the No Mutants Allowed forum having control over the development of a true Fallout 3.
21/07/2009 at 11:36 Larington says:
I suppose technically it works for say, Dwarf Fortress, where people are donating towards the development of an interesting game project. However, I’m not convinced this will translate well to a much larger scale project like a $10 mil upwards game.
21/07/2009 at 11:39 BigJonno says:
@Pags: That’s exactly what I thought. I think it’s a great business model. Produce a trial version and ask people to pay for access to the current full alpha/beta version, with the promise of receiving future updates for free.
If it can work for an open world game like M&B, surely it could work for more linear games too.
21/07/2009 at 11:39 Mike says:
There’s a lot of government funding kicking around. Some developers have received half a million upwards in the UK to get better game technologies developed in conjunction with university research.
21/07/2009 at 11:40 Stijn says:
You know what I suggest? Releasing episode three, ffs!!!!11
21/07/2009 at 11:41 EyeMessiah says:
Data of Cortex Command “fame” has a scheme whereby you can buy CC before its finished, and the earlier you buy it the cheaper it is, which gives interested players an incentive to buy into the game and help fund its development.
21/07/2009 at 11:43 cliffski says:
They could just make games cheaper.?
21/07/2009 at 11:45 Dominic White says:
While as LionsPhil rightly pointed out, there are a LOT of problems inherent in the public investing/controlling development. The thought of an NMA-led Fallout 3 is both hilarious and terrifying. I’d imagine that shareholder meetings would end up a bloody duel to the death.
Still, traditional publishers are often less-than-benevolent to their patron studios. Anyone remember Knights of the Old Republic 2? Horribly unfinished, right? There’s a reason for that – midway through development, Lucasarts cut the studios alloted time by six months. They ended up spending the remainder of their development time (as they had budgeted for much more) just trying to sew up enough loose ends to make the game playable, and there’s vast reams of unfinished content left unused in the game data files, some of which is being restored by fans.
As others have mentioned, though, a bunch of indie devs do offer to let their early adopters/fans help fund, and even steer the development of their games. I recently preordered Overgrowth, sequel to remarkably good brawly-adventure Lugaru (a bizarre hybrid of Conan the Barbarian and Watership Down). One of the most notable things the devs are doing is uploading weekly internal alpha builds for all their preorder customers to monkey around with, and help bug-hunt for, or suggest changes. The customers aren’t in charge, but they can definitely get their voices heard. I’d like to see more of that approach.
Also, I like seeing the process of a game being developed, from early engine tests to finished levels. Unfortunately, a lot of gamers don’t know anything about development, and just aren’t mature enough to handle this, and will fly off the handle if ‘SVN Alpha 34c’ doesn’t perform to their expectations.
21/07/2009 at 11:46 Crispy says:
it’s an interesting enough idea, but it’s one that only really works in Valve’s favour. People would only really want to risk investment in established companies. So what would happen to unnkown indie companies? They wouldn’t get a piece of this pie, only companies like Valve, Blizzardvision, Bethesda, EA, etc.. It wouldn’t change the landscape for the better in general.
The legal costs involved on a per-person basis would outweigh micro-investments, so microinvestors would have to be part of a syndicate of some kind (like you have with angel investor groups). But this group would have to be independant from the developers.
To establish an investor group providing cashflow in the same proportion to an angel investor group but done through microinvestments would make it impossible for the group as a whole to decide on which games to back.
I’m not sure its a workable idea.
21/07/2009 at 11:49 Gap Gen says:
Yeah, if the work of developers produce technological side-benefits, then government money seems like a good idea. There’s a Taiwanese paper out today where they’ve done an astrophysical fluids code on GPUs – given Taiwan’s chip manufacturing industry, this seems like a good idea for them. Unfortunately the code is called called GAMER, which is a bit cheesy.
21/07/2009 at 11:49 Trezoristo says:
That would actually entitle the community to act entitled, a scary thought if you ask me.
21/07/2009 at 11:53 Tei says:
Theres 1 web game that work like that.
That webgame have a subforum called “Features”. On that forum theres a list of features with a prize tag (how much will cost to the dev to create that feature).
“Animated avatars 3000 €”.
You want it? pay for it. Once theres 3000 €, the dev start doing the work.
Is a system that may work for a webgame with a existing fanbase that put his money where is his mouth. Is also “Developping games as a service”… .literal.
21/07/2009 at 11:53 Nelson says:
Stardock is almost doing this already with Elemental: WoM. Those who pre-paid for the game (full price over a year before release), get to be part of the development process through extensive alpha/beta testing. It seems to be working quite well. But imagine if people invested early in, say, Duke Nukem and it fell apart . . . ouch!
21/07/2009 at 12:00 LionsPhil says:
Part of investment is risk.
But, yeah, there was enough flaming over how people deserved that game when they handn’t actually contributed towards it.
21/07/2009 at 12:02 EtsSpets says:
Ive wanted to do that for years. I dont know about you guys but i just seem to like the style of some developers (as a company of developers and as individuals) so i wouldnt mind paying 10-20$ per month to have the develope games i like. And in the end we are paying for the games anyway. So we would be eliminating one useless link in the process – the publisher.
In any case, it is a matter of time before all (multi)media will be funded by the end user(groups). Because i think there are enough startrek/wars/gate fans out there to support even all 3 of those series.
And thinking like that, that kind of step would eliminate a lot of excess expenses. And i would say f*ck the TV channels too make it a steam like app with a bit more secure (biometric) login and get your games/music/tv shows etc from the same place.
21/07/2009 at 12:02 Vandelay says:
Amazing this is coming from Gabe. One glance at the Steampowered forums and the amount of whinging that comes from there would tell you that letting those people have a say would be a bad idea.
Still, I could certainly see this working out for small independent companies. Really isn’t to dissimilar to what happens in the rest of the entertainment industry.
21/07/2009 at 12:03 Elman says:
An X-Com remake that improves the original and adds multiplayer.
That is all.
21/07/2009 at 12:06 EtsSpets says:
The star* series was just an example i would assume the other popular series would be the same.
21/07/2009 at 12:06 jim says:
“Radiant says:
I like how no one has brought up that we already fund game development by, you know, actually buying games.”
pretty ignorant statement, you actually fund publishers through buying games, and the publishers then squezze developers and pay them virtually nothing, often running them right out of business through late and/or non payment, they often don’t see a fraction of the profits their games make. If you cut grasping publishers out of the equation, all the money that would go on paying their boards and employees huge salaries, and all the money that would go on dividends to their shareholders then goes to develiopers. Imagine if the billions upon billions that ea/thq/actiblizzard make each year went straight to devs, that’s the eqivalent of a couple of hundred extra AAA titles being funded each year.
21/07/2009 at 12:07 cliffski says:
you can listen to peoples suggestions without being a slave to a mass of opinion. I’ve had some really good ideas from people reading my blog for my next game, and also some ideas that I know I won’t use.
As well as actually being influenced by potential buyers of the game, it’s a good way to get a sort of barometer of how certain ideas will go down. There are a ton of games that would benefit from this. Spore was horribly dumbed down and casualised, and if pre-order buyers had tried an alpha, they could have fed that back to the team before that direction was done and dusted.
The mount n Blade and Dwarf Fortress model is an excellent idea, and one I’m strongly attracted to myself.
21/07/2009 at 12:09 Mike says:
I misread Cliffski’s post as mentioning Mount, Blade and Dwarf Fortress. However, this is almost certainly the game I would fund.
21/07/2009 at 12:10 Dominic White says:
Ha, I just noticed that Cliffski is doing a cross-promotion with Overgrowth, too. As the Overgrowth dev-blog says, it’s a good way of leveraging the advantages of indie studios.
http://blog.wolfire.com/
And yeah, the Mount & Blade/Cortex Command approach strikes me as a nice way of doing things. Invest early for an unfinished game on the cheap, which grows into a full product at the end, or buy later for a more polished, more complete product.
21/07/2009 at 12:11 toni says:
this idead is NOT novel. it was stolen there:
http://www.interstellarmarines.com/
they do it already. geez, when do you get your sources straight or stop repeating everyting some big games company execs feed you to say.
21/07/2009 at 12:11 Archonsod says:
It’s a cunning idea with only one slight flaw, in that Gabe has made the common mistake of assuming everyone else isn’t mentally retarded.
21/07/2009 at 12:16 dsmart says:
When I saw this yesterday, that was my first reaction.
Nothing wrong with new – creative – ideas of course, but something like this will never work and even if it actually goes into effect, will devolve into something rather unpleasant.
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.
What Gabe is suggestion is similar to donationware, but takes it one step further into the realms of “…seriously?”
Lets put it this way, how many of you would donate $40 to a game that is coming out in two years? OK, how about $20?
And when you donate that money, are you really hoping that the product is i) completed ii) developed to your satisfaction iii) actually completed and not canned.
I call Gabe’s idea “The DNF Business Plan”
21/07/2009 at 12:22 wiper says:
Shenmue III
*sobs*
(More relevantly – the best-case scenario would probably actually only allow for ‘hands-off’ investment: i.e., you’re investing because you want to see a game from [company/designer], and also would like to share in the profits, but have no actual creative input. I’m not sure how feasible a system that is)
21/07/2009 at 12:22 dsmart says:
@ toni
Thanks for posting that – as it proves my point. Look no further than posts from one partypooper
…and it goes downhill from there.
21/07/2009 at 12:24 Catastrophe says:
This is an interesting idea but I see one main fundamental flaw – People will only invest in games that are seen would do well, to make a large return on their investment. Thus AAA games will still be AAA games but the funds would come from the community making the creators rich and giving a bit of a return to the investors and games that are on a smaller scale will not get enough funds to actually make the game.
Half Life 3 = Lots of investors
CoD8 = Lots of investors
Diablo 4 = Lots of investors
Any sequel that could be extremely promising but the first game was a bit of a let down? NO chance.
Any unheard of indie game? NO chance.
It would mix up advertising and the way new games are pitched though, which would be very interesting.
Places like this would get paid a fortune to advertise said investments and concepts of games would be much more public. They would hold conventions like Blizzcon to pitch concepts to possible investors as oppose to simply advertising their game and people would have much more a say to what goes into the game.
Very interesting.
21/07/2009 at 12:26 Markoff Chaney says:
There’s a dual edged blade here. On one side, we have what a lot of us have been doing with pre-orders based on a proof of concept or early alpha from an indy allowing the developers to keep polishing and refining their idea. On the other side, we have Valve who, in the past, used to allow the game to stand on its own and then continue to polish, allowing for greater sales of the product over a longer period of time.
With risk can come reward or failure. If the sense of entitlement that came about from what Gabe himself promised (and still has yet to deliver) for Left4Dead is any yardstick to judge from, this could turn out be a monumental clusterfun of entitlement from any “investors”, who doubtlessly would vocally start whining about whatever they perceived they were owed that was not delivered to them. Maybe he likes the heat so he’s turning the oven up while staying in the kitchen? I’ve already financed one of his games, L4D2, by purchasing L4D full price. I’ll see how he rewards my investment into L4D2 before I choose to offer any more money to a studio that has a meme based on their own concept of time. (Disclaimer – I currently own all Valve games ever produced and thought that was helping to fund their next projects well enough thus far)
21/07/2009 at 12:29 yutt says:
This is Gabe’s sneaky way of trying to get me to buy L4D *three* times. You’re not foolin’ me, Sir!
21/07/2009 at 12:31 Catastrophe says:
It also opens up for many fraudulant cases where a company will get some screenshots together photoshopped up, head out to get investers, get some money, then “disappear” with all the money.
21/07/2009 at 12:34 RC-1290'Dreadnought' says:
I would fund valve project x and y, without asking. They haven’t really disapointed me so far. I’ll have to think about project z, but if x turns out good, they’ve got my support on z as well.
21/07/2009 at 12:40 Tei says:
You can start this business model today.
Download the latest version of Nexuiz, Tremulous, AlienArena, OpenArena or any other open source project.
Make a fork… so… rename the folder of the src :-)
Mod a forum, so you can post bugs from the bugtrack software, and put price to that bug ( bug, feature, wish, etc..)
Make a fillmeter, so it show a nice progress bar:
[======69%===----] 400€ to go!
If the community (the gamers) want these features to be implemented, have to put money, maybe 1 € here, 2 € there, till the progress bar fill. [=====100%====] Here we go!.
It will work? I dunno. I don’t really like it, but If theres a passionate community, that really want to pay to get things done, most game dev’s are game dev’s because love to make games :-)
21/07/2009 at 12:40 Naurgul says:
It’s actually not a novel idea. There’s SellaBand which is implementing this idea for the music market.
21/07/2009 at 12:42 bill says:
hows this any different from pre orders?
21/07/2009 at 12:53 The Sombrero Kid says:
gabe’s a genius because he agrees with me.
21/07/2009 at 12:55 The Sombrero Kid says:
@bill
yeah, in theory, you’re right, although gabe’s suggesting you pay more to begin with and if the games a success you get money back., also a preorder doesn’t necessarily go to the developers until release, depends on the distribution platform.
21/07/2009 at 13:03 frymaster says:
“but a lot of developers do need to be reigned in a little and have their games subjected to stringent testing to polish out the ‘obvious’ flaws”
case in point – look at the stuff introversion released about darwinia/multiwinia on the xbox. introversion wanted to just focus on multiwinia but MS made them go back and do a lot of work on both games – there’s usability testing reports and all sorts that they did for them
21/07/2009 at 13:03 Tworak says:
There’s a L4D joke up in erre. Late to the party.
I’m so in, Gabe! Take my money!!
21/07/2009 at 13:05 RagingLion says:
It would require you to really trust the developers if people were to ever do this – trusting them to not make a bad game. There’s a few developers that are run very solidly these days with a great games track record where that could be possible.
Ultimately the developers need have the creative vision and inspiration for whatever game, even if the public chooses an idea they like the sound of.
There’s the other issue that a game can change massively while in development and feel very different even given the same opening brief.
21/07/2009 at 13:06 T. Slothrop says:
It’s a great idea and with Steam’s infrastructure could revolutionise independent development though it scales poorly to high-budget titles where hundreds-of-thousands of thirteen-year-olds investing $10 a piece demand the game feature Havok-powered breasts, geo-mod enabled environments that you can break with your penis and Master Chief.
That said, my dreams of a Blade Runner-Deus Ex-GTA IV superhybrid draw one step closer to fulfilment! I accept money orders, loose change, cheques, non-liquid assets, heirlooms and gold, especially gold.
21/07/2009 at 13:14 Hobbes says:
On the topic of investor control:
Even though Gabe didn’t suggest it, the article says investors would have “a say in that development” i.e. that by becoming a smalltime shareholder you get to control the features of the product. Except that doesn’t make any sense – shareholders DON’T get to meddle in the everyday executive decisions of public companies: they have a remit which covers certain areas such as pay, board membership and the general direction of the company, and can vote on a few selected issues. Thus even if a developer followed Gabe’s model it would NOT mean an investor could demand a gravity gun in the next monkey island game, or whatever. Perhaps a QA/beta-testing phase would also be incorporated into the shareholder’s agreement, which could be highly beneficial for all involved and play something similar to the role of a traditional publisher.
Personally I think this is more like microfinance/microloans for indie developers, and would be unlikely to fund more than a small percentage of $10m – $30m AAA titles. I think Gabe is saying that tapping into games consumers for start-up/indie funding is beneficial for all sides from a profit point of view- as long as investors choose wisely, which applies in all markets.
RE: “It’s a good idea in theory, but It does assume that each game you invests in actually a) get finnished and b) is any good.”
So, on the same ground, all private and public investing only ‘works’ when companies make a profit? Nope, many fail, but the benefit of having large numbers of individual decision makers who control their own investment is that risk is spread around and investment for the industry/sector continues.
21/07/2009 at 13:16 Ecko says:
This idea seems pilfered from the recent Bandstocks idea, which was used to fund Patrick Wolf’s album The Bachelor (to declare an interest, one of my favourite artists) by buying shares in the production, but on a far greater scale.
21/07/2009 at 13:22 AlexW says:
No, this would not be suitable for all games everywhere, publishers would still exist (and in fact would receive a greater pressure to be forces for good in the games developed under them, since if you mistreat a dev studio they’re more likely to choose this option).
Yes, this would be a very good idea for some, where established teams that are visibly genuinely in love with developing could receive most or all of the funding they need without having to worry about publishers having a bad influence, and people worrying about studios being closed or merged or whatever are clearly missing the point about the sort of studios that would get funding.
There would need to be ground rules applied – very open development, if any of the investors want the game on a practical platform it must be done (mainly PC, 360, PS3 here), things like that.
It is not the be all and end all of future game development, but it would be a very good idea to supplement and improve the publisher model.
21/07/2009 at 13:28 Papa Voodoo says:
If this kind of system had always been the case, would we ever have had the greats we have now?
And while it does look to a worthy idea and one I would gladly participate in, it worries me that in order for funding to be available to, say, a brand new series by a brand new dev team, there would have to be alot of incentive, and this may be hard to do without giving away too much of the story setting etc.
Maybe people would just start to play it safe, resulting in a neverending stream of sequels from series they already know and love, with nothing really very new coming along.
But then again, I do ramble.
21/07/2009 at 13:29 John Walker says:
“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.”
Loads?
21/07/2009 at 13:34 c-Row says:
I have never seen one of those buttons on the websites of the games I play. Except for the RPS website, and I gladly clicked that one.
21/07/2009 at 13:36 Nando says:
I became a shareholder of Mount & Blade by around version 0.701 and now I can safely say it was my best investment in a game.
Now I’m looking forward to take part in Stardock’s “Elemental: War of Magic” financial development and pre-order beta testing. But I still think the price is quite too high for a pre-production.
21/07/2009 at 13:36 Dominic White says:
@John – Yeah, likewise. I’ve donated to quite a few indie studios (several times to the Dwarf Fortress dev), and preorder-invested in a bunch of games. Cortex Command, Overgrowth, Mount & Blade, etc.
I’ve got fuck-all disposable income at the moment, so I’m admittedly spending less on such things at the moment, but once I’ve got more cash, I’ll continue giving money to those who produce neat little games that I enjoy.
21/07/2009 at 13:38 dracko says:
Can I fund an editor and some proper playtesters for Valve? They sure as Hell could use them.
21/07/2009 at 13:48 Fullbleed says:
If I would invest in anything it would be either a Gaunt’s Ghosts game or an Eisenhorn game. Perhaps purely because these book series would be too monumental to be tansfered to film. Plus an Imperial Guard/Inquisitor FPS would so much better than a Space Marine one.
21/07/2009 at 13:56 herald the Fabolous says:
only the succesful producer would get games financed by gamers, because the outcome is secure – and they get their games financed anyway. But on the other hand, niche games will (should) succesfully get financed by their tight userbase.
The discussion is not so much on whether users will finance games, but rather how it will translate to practice: if i put 300-1000£ into a game, i’d
1) want revenue share
2) want a say in which ideas to implement
3) be susceptible to pull out if my ideas were voted down by majority
a great game on paper can be a horrible game to play – NOT even counting bugs. And if i’d invested in one, i’d feel cheated. B) the trick is not getting micro-investors, teh trick is to coordinate it all into a final game.
Utilizing current realities of producers (late) inclusion of player created content and ideas (EVE online has a thread from developers, asked to input for a revised newbie tutorial – which is btw not even close to their biggest problem, resulting in newbies loose heart)
such a solution would be to FIRST sketch the game in all it’s details: controls, story, mechanics, graphics style. THEN ask thousands of fans or intrested people to input on it, THEN develop said game with own money. Thus you get a traditioanlly developed game – which you yourself control – , but which the gamers are more likely to buy.
Not Wiki-gaming, or open source, but something the likes thereof.
21/07/2009 at 14:01 roBurky says:
Yeah, I’ve spent more on Dwarf Fortress donations than I have on any commercial non-MMO game.
21/07/2009 at 14:08 kadayi says:
A remake of Deus Ex
21/07/2009 at 14:12 Blast Hardcheese says:
I’d gladly donate to whatever Edmund McMillen is working on at the moment, especially if it meant Hitlers Must Die! or Super Meat Boy came out faster, but I don’t expect a say in the design process because that would be silly.
Gabe Newell is an idealist. I respect him, but what he’s saying isn’t going to happen… yet.
Of course, if this had existed when they first announced TF2 the first time, back around ’98…
21/07/2009 at 14:43 castle says:
Yeah! This would be just like if you went to your local GameStop, payed $50 for a game, then took it home and couldn’t open it a year. And then when you do open it, there’s a 70% chance there’s a game inside.
I don’t see anyone other than a small core of gamers participating in something like this. Your average gamer just wants to plop down some cash for instant shootey gratification. If there’s a chance that the game won’t get made, or it’ll get made poorly, where’s the incentive to put down cash a year or two ahead of time? A small chance at returning a profit? There’s just not a consumer advantage over the current business model, in which we get to spend our money on known quantities and receive instant gratification.
21/07/2009 at 14:46 Taillefer says:
Is it cheaper for dev studios to produce everything in-house, or to outsource modelling/animating, texture artists, etc? And how often does the outsourcing happen?
Bit of a tangent, because I was thinking about those companies specialising in only producing certain parts of a game could become much more well-known if this were to take off. As in, “Oh, that studio provided some sublime voice-acting for game X.. tell the devs to use those.” or “Oh, hey, that studio does amazing models and animation…” Do these kinds of companies even exist?
It also means you can invest in the idea, an interesting concept, without worrying about whether that dev can do everything else to the quality you want.
The impression I keep getting is that game devs seem to try and tackle everything themselves, where as the film industry, for example, seems more …modular?
21/07/2009 at 14:51 A Disembodied Voice says:
“Lets put it this way, how many of you would donate $40 to a game that is coming out in two years? OK, how about $20?”
If, like Mr Newell seems to be suggesting, it was an actual investment (not a donation) and all the details of that were worked out well, then I’d be interested in putting in a lot more than that into projects like Subversion from Introversion or Zeno Clash 2 for example.
21/07/2009 at 14:57 Alaric says:
Oooh! Wow! Gabe Newell invented publicly traded stock! Imagine that!
Seriously though, this is what it is. At least for his sake I hope this is what he meant. Otherwise the idea is just about as preposterous as square wheels and diesel-powered spacecraft.
Investing in something, anything, that you have no control over, is ridiculous. When I put money in various funds, I expect a degree of control and most importantly I expect accountability. Here is how much I invested, here is what was done with it, and here is how much I have now.
What Mr. Newell is proposing, suggests a risk no sane person will be willing to take. It is akin to paying taxes really. You know the money will be spent stupidly and the only thing you can do about it is take it like a man.
Suppose I am wrong though. Suppose the money will be spent intelligently. Not squandered, not mismanaged, but actually put to a good use. Then what? Does that guarantee the game will be finished? Does that guarantee it will be good?
I didn’t meet too many game developers in person, but the ones I did meet were almost certainly human. It is human nature to only work hard when one has vested interest. If money falls from heaven, who the hell is going to put forth effort? Ok some people will, but merely “some” people are not enough.
A publisher, as much as we like to condemn them, serves one very important role. It stands behind the developers with a baseball bat. It wants it’s damned money back.
I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have the ability to fly to the developer’s headquarters every day to motivate them that way. And even if I did, they wouldn’t even let me in. Who am I? One of many tiny investors – a nobody. This is why we need publishers and this is why the whole idea is … unsound.
21/07/2009 at 15:16 Filipe says:
21/07/2009 at 15:18 Filipe says:
And that, folks, is me not knowing how to use tags properly.
21/07/2009 at 15:25 LionsPhil says:
Not only is Alaric correct, he also has an icon from Legend of Kyrandia. I am impressed.
21/07/2009 at 15:26 Tyshalle says:
I’d invest good money into a new Fallout game made by the original developers rather than this Fallout 3 abomination.
I’d also love to see someone make a GTA IV style zombie apocalypse game, sort of in the vein of Resident Evil 2 where it’s all about survival rather than action action action!
21/07/2009 at 15:35 Gutter says:
Newell better have a fuckingly unique vision on how to approach this, because just asking for John Q Public to finance games will give… threads like this one.
21/07/2009 at 15:36 Smurfy says:
Any game made by Valve.
£10 extra if it’s an open world role playing game set shortly after the seven hour war where you play as a member of the Resistance back when it was really huge.
21/07/2009 at 15:37 Ed says:
I dunno, like others have said, it worked really well for Mount and Blade. I can’t see this business model working at all for AAA (god I hate that term so damn much) games though – but definitely for indy games it can work.
Also, I’m not sure why he’s trying to sweeten the deal by offering the potential for RoI – the game itself should be the return on this investment.
M&B’s model was simple, charge a little for early version, and as the game improves as it approaches completion, charge more, but those who have already bought in stay in – that way people are more likely to fund it in the early years to save money in the long run.
21/07/2009 at 15:39 dsmart says:
@ John Walker
Well, that makes two of us then. A few million more to go.
21/07/2009 at 15:48 fearghaill says:
The other nice thing about the Mount & Blade model is it gives the early adopters “indie cred” like the music wankers have, all claiming to have been into the game not only before it was cool, but before it was even released.
I chipped in on M&B when it was $10 or $15 and felt damn good about it. I got a fun to play if rough and unfinished game, and I knew I was supporting an indie dev as they made that game better. warm fuzzies abound.
21/07/2009 at 15:56 Mad Doc MacRae says:
I came here to make sure people mentioned Mount & Blade and can leave satisfied.
/got it when it was $10, and split the cost with my brothers. absolutely best investment I’ve ever made
21/07/2009 at 16:01 yutt says:
I just thought I’d mention, this is similar to how Unknown Worlds (the developers of Natural Selection) have been funded. First with their Constellation system which helped fund NS1 development, and now with NS2′s where you pay twice the price to get access to the alpha/beta and get a different skinned model in-game after release.
Albeit that is donation, not investment, based. The main thing needed is an intermediary entity to facilitate the actual handling of funds, because I doubt the indie studios that would benefit most from this have the financial knowledge or manpower to handle it.
21/07/2009 at 16:25 Peanut says:
I would invest my money in getting Peter Molyneux off his butt with all this Fable crap and get him to make Dungeon Keeper 3 already, oh and steal the IP back from those Chinese guys who have it for some odd reason.
21/07/2009 at 16:27 Moonracer says:
While this sounds great to me, I have to look at my current game shopping habits. I tend to wait 6+ months after a game is released to purchase it. By that time a decent patch has been released, reviews are all said and done, I know whether the game is actually mod friendly and has a modding community, and often the price has already gone down or there is a sale. When I don’t do this I usually kick myself. So my faith in games being released as expected is pretty low.
Also, I would be too tempted to invest in “good” games, and “good” games are rarely blockbusters.
21/07/2009 at 16:33 Gutter says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 16:37 Psychopomp says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 16:49 AndrewC says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 16:49 AndrewC says:
$90,000
21/07/2009 at 16:51 Don says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 17:24 Colin Hansen says:
I’m sure I’m late, but… tyranny of the majority?
21/07/2009 at 17:43 SteveHates says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 17:46 Guhndahb says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 17:55 Gutter says:
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
21/07/2009 at 17:57 Dominic White says:
@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.
21/07/2009 at 18:00 Chemix says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 18:08 The Innocent says:
I’d invest in a Dominions 4. That would be amazing.
21/07/2009 at 18:11 Gorgeras says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 18:36 Pijama says:
And turn the public into an excuse for the state of market? eh.
21/07/2009 at 18:37 mpuncekar says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 18:52 shiggz says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 19:03 Gutter says:
@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.
21/07/2009 at 19:25 Biz says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 19:25 yutt says:
Amusingly, Flayra from Unknown Worlds heard about this interview and responded, “We HAVE been funded like that!”
http://twitter.com/NS2/status/2761475103
21/07/2009 at 20:29 Mister Adequate says:
“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.
21/07/2009 at 20:48 lumpi says:
Yes yes and yes.
Skepticism aside, this could be a wonderful idea. Of course, without the “fans can demand gameplay changes” part…
21/07/2009 at 20:52 Adventurous Putty says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 20:57 Vertel says:
Loom 2.
21/07/2009 at 21:51 Devan says:
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.
21/07/2009 at 22:38 Jason says:
check out the good game website for a twenty minute interview with mr Newell, its pretty cool.
21/07/2009 at 23:30 Gap Gen says:
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.
22/07/2009 at 00:08 wake says:
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.
22/07/2009 at 00:34 Stromko says:
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.
22/07/2009 at 01:17 Radicand says:
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.
22/07/2009 at 01:26 wake says:
@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.
22/07/2009 at 01:42 Jon R. says:
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…)
22/07/2009 at 01:43 perilisk says:
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.
22/07/2009 at 01:47 Dominic White says:
@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.
22/07/2009 at 02:41 iLike trains says:
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
22/07/2009 at 02:46 Wedge says:
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.
22/07/2009 at 02:56 somedude says:
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.
22/07/2009 at 03:01 wake says:
@ 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?
22/07/2009 at 04:16 Deg says:
Which developer, or which game idea, would you throw your money behind to make it happen?
Myst Online: Uru Live
22/07/2009 at 08:09 TeeJay says:
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 $30 million we could have bought Firaxis and got them to making a new Alpha Centaurii instead of the console version of Civ?
22/07/2009 at 09:03 EtsSpets says:
Reading all these comments makes me kinda sick.
There are so many “interesting” statements, like the “micro investors wouldnt work, they would need to be syndicated!”, what about countries then, they dont work ?
And direct funding wouldnt really change anything but the amount of money we are putting in a game and the quality of the game. The games would be a lot cheaper to buy and we would have a more direct say in the game development.
And as some say “it would be mayhem” and “a full asylum of fans” ffs, the whole worlds an asylum, so shut it. There are perfectly good ways to get to know the micro investors via complex polls etc.
And the so called micro investors would syndicate naturally like in real life. Someone would put forth a concept and people would support that or not and offer their own ideas upon that concept. You can even look at it as a huge tree graph as you progress through development there are “branches”(concepts) to choose from and continue to develope those, each one would have a price tag etc.
So for the closure – the publishers must go or change their perspective on game development. The main flaw is that the publisher wants to make money, the developer and the end customer just want a great game. So its pretty obvious who is the fifth wheel.
Plus for the funding, do they eat money ? Lets say we have a 1000 person studio where everybody got payed 200$ 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 ?
22/07/2009 at 10:57 K says:
“Any comments on that ?”
Apply same argument to charities, third world aid, medical research…
22/07/2009 at 15:29 Alaric says:
Angry or not, Jon R. makes a lot of sense actually.
22/07/2009 at 22:07 Chemix says:
EtsSpets: See my comment, it’s the longest one, or close to it
23/07/2009 at 01:36 Digit says:
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.
23/07/2009 at 03:24 apnea says:
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.
23/07/2009 at 08:21 Trithemius says:
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?
21/08/2009 at 05:21 Margaret says:
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
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10/02/2012 at 10:41 Raiyan 1.0 says:
YOU WERE RIGHT GABE NEWELL! O_O
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/02/09/double-fine-kickstarter/