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...

Cross-Platform Game Development Made Easy?

This announcement caught my eye: It's for Game Closure, a cross-platform SDK that lets you create a game in HTML 6 and Javascript that runs on Facebook, iOS, Android, and in any browser without plugins. They claim to have a compiler that uses OpenGL and other APIs to get solid performance out of these games.

Now, this may or may not be worthwhile for games that have high performance requirements. But for games that really aren't based around pushing pixels as fast as possible, writing one game and having it be ready to ship on Facebook, iOS, Android an web browsers is a pretty cool idea.

Time-to-market is an important factor, and one of the most important things about mobile and social games is that they are not a singular event, launched and never touched again. Instead, these games are a process; you put something out there, you gather data from users (harvested automatically by the analytics you embed), you analyze the data, make changes to the game, and see what the effects are. Did it work? Great, keep it. Not so good? Change it.

Given that model, being able to get a game out quickly is important. It establishes your brand, you build an audience, you make some money... and you get the data you need to improve it.