Personally, I would blindly invest $100 a game if Valve, Blizzard, Bethesda, Bungie or BioWare were making anything and wanted the community to invest in their games. Because their reputation is, “It’s done, when it’s done.” Their polish and history of making great games is wortt the risk because it’s a very low risk proposition to an investor.

If EA did this for Madden I would invest because they sell millions of copies of Madden. However, if it’s some unknown developer with a good idea, they are going to have a tough time finding investors for games.

And I disagree that gamers are cheap. Young gamer’s parents are cheap not the gamers themselves.

Well, will take time for a player to understand the time, research and development on each game thats produced.

Gabe has too much money to ask for that, unless they really wanna step outside the traditional conservative development, and step heavily into the field of newly freshen ideas.

Even that the public has shown to be too much used to all concepts behind games.

They dont question:

1 – why mmos ask me to press 1 key and watch the whole battle without having to aim, duck, step forward, measure angle and strenght on a bow…

2 – why the SO CALLED rpgs like final fantasy have menus to produce actions, while i have years of gaming practice and can deal with instant action.

3 – why some games always show me pre-built ways to accomplish my objectives, instead of letting me decide, think and improvise on situations…

Well, i guess this COULD work, but WOULD need a lot , a HELL LOT to make it feasible and exciting for the investors (the gamers)

Gabe is saying let us, the gamer, provide developer costs so that the risk of development is off of their shoulders and onto someone else. Investment doesn’t give you a refund button thus if something goes belly up well then that’s unfortunate. However this is one of the strong factors that keeps good games good because if they messed up they lost their money. And since the “investors” are really just gamers who trusted them to produce something atleast a few good years down the line, the gamers are going in blind with actually minimal investments (By market standards). There would be absolutely no legal protection for the gamers as the money lost for each individual investor would be too low to actually raise an eye brow within the economy.

For some companies it might work but with a large amount of the incentive gone the average game would go down in quality (Even more than it has been decreasing).

This wont work until something gets hammered out that allows gamers really feel they have some benefit to supporting the game. As a gamer, I have learned to always be suspicious of anything new coming to the table. I never trust an initial announcement on project ideas and would assume that most others feel the same way.

Duke Nukem Forever, anyone?

Well, you can look at the open source community, which historically has had a hard time putting games together. But, you have to find a way to monetize things. I would be curious if this is just an idea Valve is throwing around or if there is any market research that would support this approach; are there some other form of artists (movies, literature, music, games or otherwise) who have successfully managed this sort of pay-scheme?

I do see some potential in this system, particularly if it is made more granular. That is, if I can attach a reason for my funding then I am more likely to fund. I think funding may be necessary on two conditions. One, there is a lack of resources addressing a particular feature. Say if the company historically puts out good game mechanics, but the art is short, the art dept. could require more funding and if I wanted better art, I could specify that I wanted to support the art dept. On the other hand, instead of supporting R&D, perhaps I would want to reward the department most responsible for a feature of the game, maybe the sound. But, it sounds like Valve is mostly looking at the first approach (for now).

I think there are far too many details to work out and far too little information about what Valve would actually like to get out of this rather than just “see what happens.”