Crowdfunding is such a buzz-word nowadays. Not sure about it, but I think everything started with minecraft where you was able to buy a pre-alpha version to get the right of the full game when it is completed. Which was really a great idea and I always wanted to do a similiar thing.

Whatever - a result of the "minecraft"-approach was crowdfunding. Where Developers ask potential buyers to buy the game in advace and get special extras for pre-purchasing. In the end, the buyers themselfs fund the whole development of the game.

This way developers can start working without needing to go to a publisher. In the end it should be(!) also possible to release a little bit later but give the game more quality. Not sure if that will be done, I don't think so.

But the purpose of this post is another one - just think about it. If a game studio asks for funding, say, they need 1 million to make the game ready - now people start to drop their piece (if they like it). In the end, before the game is actually released, it is already sold.

When time is ready and the final game is released it has already gathered income right before pirates was able to copy it.

Well, in the end there will still be piracy after the release, but after all the bills are paid. If there is enough income, the studio will be able to make a sequel. If not, it will be harder to make a sequel - could also be that the sequel will be funded too.

I really like the approach of crowdfunding, as long as you can give your players a good piece of benefits for helping you. I am quite interessting how crowdfunding will do in the future, because there is one major problem:

there is no guarantee, that the game will be of high quality or will be released at all, because maybe they run out of money solely because of bad managment - such things already happened.
My fear is, that users/players/buyers lose trust into crowdfunding because some dumbasses are not able to deliver a product with a calculated budget. So let's see and hopefully that will be a shiny future for good games out there again ;-)