Valve Wants You to Fund Their Game Development?

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Consumers and gamers alike feel it’s their right to complain about the things they buy, and core gamers are most notorious for bad mouthing and slamming the games they hold so dear. But what if they paid for development out of their own pockets?

Gabe Newell, Valve’s head honco and big bundle of fun, 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 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.

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 (even if that is not the case).

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 chip in $5.

It’s sad, but we’re inherently cheap. 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. Would you?

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