Funding New Games

Reedo writes "RPG Vault has an interesting article about securing funding for new games. The article was put together by Doug Mealy, the President of Online Marketing and Public Relations. It covers points of view from investors, as well as game developers who have succeeded in landing funding. A good read if you're curious about what's involved when trying to get a game funded."

Comments

Notes from Underground

[sm.arson]

With typical game budgets being in the $500,000 range, I'm wondering if there still is a place for the "garage" game developer.

Take my little project, for example. I'm currently trying to scrape together $3,000 to: 1) buy a decent soundtrack, 2) buy some decent sound effects, and 3) advertise on a few websites. The rest of the time and effort required to bring the game up to a "marketable" level (adding lots of eyecandy and gameplay extras) comes directly from me, so I don't include that in the final price.

I'd like to be able to simply take out a personal loan, but for that I'd have to be pretty sure that the game could sell at least 300 copies online at $10 a pop.

If this little game works, it's not that much of a stretch to pull together $30,000 (about the size of a car loan) for a game, if you could expect to sell 3000 copies at $10 each. It then becomes like real estate, I suppose.

If it were only that easy. I suspect that the distance between a finished game and a sold game is just as long as the distance between an idea and a finished game... Clearly, big budgets don't necessarily equate to big sales, but does that mean that small budget titles don't even stand a chance at profit?