How media creation is funded

glennmagusharvey

This came out of a Steam conversation with someone offsite.  I just came up with this chart:

	Consumer funding (at least in part)	Investor funding (solely)
Public influence on creative process	crowdfunding	publisher backing
Private influence on creative process	patron system	venture capital

Edit: better version of chart:

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|   Funding source     | Consumer funding | Investor funding|
|  (and influence on   |(at least in part)|     (solely)    |
|  creative process)   |                  |                 |
|

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|  Distributed source  |  crowdfunding    |publisher backing|
|

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| Concentrated source  |  patron system   | venture capital |
|

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Kraken

That's a chart?

glennmagusharvey

I can't get the lines to show up using this editor.  I'm sorry.

Kraken

Maybe you could save it into an image or something.

Naas_Human

I expected something a little more... analytical. Is that too much to ask for?

glennmagusharvey

Haha...sorry about that.  It was just a thought that I found rather interesting and wanted to jot down somewhere and get some feedback about.

Basically, someone raised the question, what if games were funded by wealthy patrons, like the way various artistic media used to be -- for example how rich nobles would bankroll an entire orchestra along with conductor and composer to write and perform music at their social gatherings (and for their personal enjoyment).  What would it change, relative to the way things are done today, between major publishers and Kickstarters and such?

At first, it seemed like the venture capital model -- single source of funds (and thus, de facto creative control).  However, venture capital (a.k.a. angel investors) differs in that investors are (broadly speaking) only interested monetizing the product and necessarily demand a return on investment, while a patron is at least significantly also interested in the product itself, and feels an existence value.  Or something like that.

And it turns out to be somewhat similar to crowdfunding, except that crowdfunding gets funding (and sometimes, creative input) from a lot of smaller sources.  The goal is generally to create a marketable product, too, but the crowdfunders themselves are interested in the product (and crowdfunding campaigns pretty much never offer cash rewards, and the backer rewards are far less liquid than cash).

(Though one could say that at some higher backer tiers, it's almost like being a patron...)

So I realized that there's roughly two variables being examined in this picture: whether the funding source(s) are from people who care about the product for what it is or just as something to be monetized, and whether the funding source(s) (and thus, frequently, influences on the creative process) are distributed among many people or concentrated with one (or a few) individual(s).

(Come to think of it, I should change the rows to distributed vs. concentrated funding.  Public vs. private is not the right term to use here.)

Kraken

Well for one thing, patrons who fund orchestras can only sell tickets to so many people. 

Not so with video games. Video games has to be distributed to everyone. And what people can't buy legally, they'll pirate.

glennmagusharvey

Well yeah; kickstarter backers don't expect a game to be made just for them, either.

Good point, in observing that the duplicability/replicability of media these days has turned entertainment from a service (that only exists on the spot) into a product (that can be resold later and has durability).  Which does change things a bit.