Gabe Newell
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.
Pretty interesting idea if you ask me, 100,000 people willing to invest $50 into a game they have interest in could pretty much fund the entire games development and insure it sees the light of day. This would give more incentive for the developers to listen closely to fan feedback, maybe even hold private testing for investors allowing them to critique and shape the game, and of course there is that part about investors making back money from the investment.. this could be absolutely insane, or absolutely brilliant, I'm not sure which, but I'm leaning towards brilliant.
