Kickstarter

I bought into the Mobile Frame Zero Kickstarter via Penny Arcade. I liked the idea of a table-top dice-based battle game which uses Lego bricks as the protagonists and well as the scenery, but I was also interested in Kickstarter itself as a new (to me anyway) way of funding things.

Traditionally you either pay up front for things or you get them “free”, but stuffed full of adverts. Either way, someone else invested capital and is now trying to make profit (Return on Investment or ROI). With Kickstarter you can choose to help fund something up front (cloud-sourced capitalism maybe).

In this case the project has also declared that the output will be open-sourced, which gives it a sense of purity – once the funding has achieved its objective (to create the game rules in this case) the product will be given away, so nobody (or everybody, if you prefer) can exploit it. Cloud-sourced patronage, perhaps?

Maybe this model could be adapted for music and film? A band pledges to write some music (or release some they already have ready to go) and once enough backers fund it the piece or album is written and released. Given that the band were paid up front there’s no need for copyright. Some people will benefit from the piece without paying, but what comes around goes around – there will be other pieces that you didn’t fund that you come to benefit from too. You also get to influence what gets done more directly than the traditional market system where investors take ‘risks’ (or more likely don’t, preferring to rehash the same pop culture ad nauseam) and then hope to exploit them afterwards. Here the money goes directly to the stuff you actually want to see. And after, maybe your name stays on a permanent list of backers as a testament to the stuff you helped create (even in only a small, remote way).