The Managing Director of Valve, Gabe Newell, was recently interviewed and shared his vision of the future of gaming and development. Hopefully it doesn’t spark any interest from other game developers, as it paints a ridiculous vision of the future of game development.
Here’s what he had to say:
“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.”
In essence, Gabe Newell believes that if gamers really desire a certain concept for a game, they should be able to fund the development for the game. Realistically though, Valve is a multi-million dollar corporation with a lot of success in the gaming industry, and for them to ask gamers to pay for development costs seems unreasonable.
If a concept really sounds fun and potentially successful, that should be enough motivation for a company to begin the process of putting the game in development. Let’s just hope that gamers aren’t forced to pay for the fees of future titles before they technically exist.
[Source]
