Valve's Newell On Community-Funded Games

Modern games are extremely expensive to make. High-profile, AAA titles have budgets in the tens of millions, and even the smaller, independent titles can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to make. Couple this with development times that frequently reach three or four years and you have publishers who are very shy about investing in new projects, particularly for unproven IPs. Valve co-founder Gabe Newell recently spoke about a new way of funding such games: "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.'" Such a system would certainly relieve some of the pressure to stick with tried-and-true concepts (and possibly get management to grant a little more leeway with deadlines and resources), and it would make the video game industry more of a meritocracy than it already is.

Comments

Then open it up

[CarpetShark]

Well all they've gotta do is start an open source project for it, like blender, and make sure it's something that can continue to develop so it's worth the investment. No one wants to invest in a projec they play once, or that won't be available for their multi-Cell watchphone in 15 years.

Re:Then open it up

[L4t3r4lu5]

So tier investments.

£10 gets you a copy of the game, £30 gets you a copy of the game and a vote in feature requests, £50 gets you two votes, £100 gets you direct access to the feature list to make suggestions yourself (without requiring votes to appear in a shortlist), etc. with a bracket for those who will get ROI in form of dividend based on performance.

Perspective from finance

[Z8]

I work in finance, so I've studied a bit about the best capital structure to use to finance a risky project. For instance, classical finance was often concerned with a given company's optimum mix of equity (stocks) and debt (bonds). In recent decades there have been an explosion of alternative financing methods proposed, and Gabe's suggestion can be seen in this context. Here are some basic questions to ask:

• Would game sponsorship act more like equity, with unlimited upside?
• Or would it behave more like debt, with a fixed upside (e.g. a free game)
• Is there a sufficiently liquid market for this? Would there be a secondary market (i.e. could people sell their sponsorships)?
• What are the transaction costs? They could be regulatory hurdles, analysis costs, or middlemen (paying lawyers/bankers/accountants).
• What kind of ROC/IRR would be demanded for sponsorship? How would this compare to current sources of financing?
• What are the tax considerations in various countries?

So, is this a promising investment vehicle? Overall, I think the current system works well for larger (e.g. $30M) projects. Gamers are interested in playing games, and don't necessarily have large amounts of money that they want to risk. It would be inefficient for them to bear the investment risk. However, for smaller projects ($200K), the analysis costs in getting a big player to understand the nature and market of the project could be prohibitive. Gamers, who already have specific knowledge of the market, might be able to finance the project efficiently because their cheaper analysis costs would outweigh their lower risk tolerance and access to capital.

Re:So...

[Joe Jay Bee]

I doubt that valve has a hard time finding investors for it's games these days

They don't need one. Newell is a Microsoft millionaire and the company is private. This, combined with the fact that Half-Life and its successors have been massively successful (hence profitable) means they have pretty much enough cash to do whatever they please.

I don't know why HL2 took so long, maybe there was a reason for that which I would know if I were investing in them, but that's the only thing I could see holding valve up.

Simply because they're very, very into getting a game right rather than getting it on shelves quicker - and their deep pockets allow for that. If HL2 were a rush job it wouldn't be anywhere near as good as it is.