Investors, Capital Loans, Drug Money, Etc.

-Erik L. Elmore

Either through capital (owner's equity?), that is, your own cash, or through a venture capitalist (harder with games). These are my guesses.

Bootstrapping is a viable option...

For Paintball NET, we developed the game in 2 stages: first the server (which could support MUD-style vt100), and then the Windows 95 graphical client. Development of both was in our spare time (we both had full time jobs and families). We started by running the game from my ISP shell account. After a while, the game was making enough money that we bought a domain name (paintball-net.com) and leased a full server to be our "main" server. Since then, we've done several major development upgrades of the game and we've added a couple more servers.

We used the income from Paintball NET (and from our full-time jobs) to fund our next project, Artifact. About the time Artifact went into public beta, I left my full-time job (though my partner still maintains his). Artifact went into general release in October of this year, and is growing. We have 2 full and 2 partial servers currently running about 16 games, and we're about to add another full server to host another 8-10 games. Artifact is still a few months from "breaking even" and repaying all development costs incurred (excepting time of the developers, of course; I'm referring to licensing fees, server leasing charges, etc).

If you're willing to take it slow and persist, just about any game (or other software) you choose to develop can turn a profit.

For us, the plan has been to create income streams with each project to help fund the *next* project. That way we're not dependent on outside funds and have the freedom to develop what we please. So far, we're progresing according to plan (even if Artifact did take an extra year to develop than we originally thought ;-) ).

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DavidRM
Samu Games

You can try for venture capital. If you do, you need to be prepared to convince a VC that it is worth investing in your idea even though there is a rampant failure rate in the game industry. I am attempting to prove this by showing how I can reduce risk through project management, additional revenue streams, organization, and strong corporate culture that breeds success.(I can demonstrate this) In your business plan the most important aspect to show is that your idea has merit and can succeed. Second to that, and this is a very close second, is that the team can adapt and make use of the money to turn a profit should the idea fail.

Hope this helps.
Derek

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Derek Licciardi

[This message has been edited by kressilac (edited December 21, 1999).]

Now, I'm still in highschool, so none of this really applies to me, but if I understand correctly, a good game can cost a lot of money to make. Lets say that a person just left his last job, at some big software company. He wants to start his own game developing company. Where does he get the money to develop a game, pay his employees (assuming he has some), and get an office building to work in?

My advise would be, follow DavidRM's example, get a job! I have a job programming for a bank, and I program on my own game project in my spare time. (commuting on the ferry, weekends)
Plus, as an added bonus, my work has some very nice development tools, so in my downtime, I can use them and the documentation to do some debugging.