New Ways To Fund Game Development

Build your audience and your funding at the same time.

Gamasutra.com has an excellent feature on funding game development through crowdsourcing, complete with a breakdown of fees and features. The big dog in this crowd is of course Kickstarter, subject of a recent feature in Wired magazine. Basically, the concept is simple: You post a project, offering benefits to people who commit to funding, and take pledges. If you meet the threshold you set in a certain time period, you proceed with the project and ship the finished project to the people who pledged the money.

Kickstarter has been primarily for physical goods, but they have funded some 67 game projects. Now new services are springing up, offering variations on Kickstarter's model. One new one, 8-Bit Funding, is focused completely on games.

This is an interesting model for developers who need some funding to get their projects under way, but don't want to try and find an angel investor or venture capital (and accept the sale of an interest in the company in return for that financing). It's also a great way to get your marketing efforts going, and develop a community of interest about your game before it's even done. I could see this being used to fund development of specific DLC for a game, for an add-on you aren't sure would make sense to develop until you're sure there's an audience.

Another example of how marketing is blending with other aspects of a business in the brave new game business world...