Valve wants you to fund game development
by Steve on 21/07/09 at 1:50 pm
Do you as a gamer wish you had more say in what goes in to a games development? Well if your ready to put your money where your mouth is the developers over at Valve are ready to take you on…
Gabe Newell, Valve’s head honcho has tossed a new idea into the fray: let the gamers fund development.
One of the areas that I am super interested in right now is how we can do financing from the community. So right now, what typically happens is you have this budget – it needs to be huge, it has to be $10m – $30m, and it has to be all available at the beginning of the project. There’s a huge amount of risk associated with those dollars and decisions have to be incredibly conservative.
What I think would be muci, h 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.
What may sound good in theory most likely wouldn’t work out the way that Gabe describes above. Most gamers aren’t willing to give any developer money unless they believe they will definitely be getting something good in return – there would have to be some pre production work and ideas shown, and a open forum for suggestions before anyone would be willing to chip in.
For smaller projects that type of model would work, but if 50,000 people are interested in a game, a developer would be lucky if even half that were willing to hand over $5.
It’s sad, but we’re inherently cheap people but at the same time want that blockbusting game. I couldn’t see any gamer putting his own cash towards development unless they’re guaranteed the product will get finished and be exactly what they wanted. It’s a great idea however I would need to see his outline on how the whole procedure would work because lets just say 50,000 people are interested and at 5 bucks a person will get you a decent budget, but now your talking about trying to keep 50,000 people and each of their individual ideas and opinions in one game, sounds pretty tough to pull off.
-Steve
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