[meheleventyone]

This article is a bit stating the status quo because games have largely not been funded by VC for most of their lifetime. Although saying that I’ve worked at three venture backed studios in two decades. Although these have all been focused around ‘bigger ideas’ rather than a single game.

I would say the days of crowdfunding being a sensible strategy for early stage funding isn’t true anymore. Rather it’s a great way to spend money to help build a community early on. You need a lot of work and good production value to attract attention.

Games funding itself feels like it’s in a tricky place. Even “indie” titles are getting up into budgets of $1-2 million and obviously on the other end of the scale there’s non-stop complaining about how AAA costs are out of control versus the money consumers are willing to spend. Then there feels like a scattershot of smaller publishers that are to an extent preying on starry eyed kids making their first game where budgets offered are unsustainably small and promises to help with discovery never happen.

From a developer perspective VC seems a lot more attractive as well. Typically less onerous to get, different kind of working relationship, doesn’t eat into revenue and the numbers are higher! But you have to be making something very specifically interesting to the people investing and have a team pedigree they recognise.