Crowdsourcing Game Development Funding

This is an interesting article on the idea of getting lots of people to each put in a little money to allow game development to happen:

Pay $5 to help fund development of new indie project Cardinal Quest and you’ll get a free copy of the game when it’s finished. Pay $10, however, and your name will also appear in the game’s end credits.

A donation of $100, meanwhile, will also get you a Cardinal Quest t-shirt and the chance to design one of the game’s characters.

Those putting forward $500 will get 5 per cent of the game’s profits as well. Pay up $1000 and the developer will visit you personally to say thanks, on top of a ten per cent profit slice, and a credit on the game’s intro screen as “The Patron Saint of Cardinal Quest”.

This innovative pay and reward system has led to Cardinal Quest’s developer, Tametick, accumulate $2,310 in investment from dozens of fans in just a few days. The studio now has about a month to reach its $6,000 target.

If successful, it could open the industry’s eyes to a new kind of investment initiative – crowdfunding.