[vetleen]

This doesn't quite capture the picture because Europe often have public subsidies as well. For instance the publicly owned "Innovation Norway" in Norway has a budget of NOK 1,5 billion, which translates to about US$60 per capita. Most of this is spent on subsidising entrepreneurial ventures.

[_delirium]

I definitely see this in indie games. Things like the Nordic Game Fund are really nice compared to what's available in the U.S., although Canada is also pretty generous with funding small videogame startups (especially Quebec, which has additional province-level funding). In the U.S., you can only really make it if you: 1) bootstrap; or 2) target social games or "gamification", which are the only things VCs care about. Companies more in the Playdead (Denmark) vein rarely get funding, although the U.S. does have quite a few bootstrapped success stories--- just looking at Santa Cruz, CA, alone, both Gaijin Games and Team Meat, makers of bit.trip and Super Meat Boy, respectively, are recently bootstrapped and successful.

For early-stage seed funding, there are also all sorts of target-agnostic entrepreneurship programs in Europe, which will kick $20k or something your way if you have anything approximating a reasonable business plan; makes it much easier to just strike out on your own without having to do consulting work to fund it. On the other hand, the fact that the U.S. has more than its share of successful bootstrapped indie-game companies suggests that either the culture or ecosystem is doing something positive there even with VCs being absent.