Nice idea, but in practice this could never work at scale.
A hundred, a thousand, a million stakeholders in a project? They'd have near-zero say in the direction of the project and essentially no recourse if the developer went off the rails.
A hundred, a thousand, a million stakeholders in a project? They'd have near-zero say in the direction of the project and essentially no recourse if the developer went off the rails.
Simply: publicly-traded publishers would already be funding the games that gamers want. If you want a free preview of how fan-funded game development would go, buy a few hundred shares of Acti-lizzard.
The fact that this model has broken down so thoroughly in the entertainment markets -- where products not developed via market survey are the rare exception -- is precisely why Newell is complaining.
What he's -actually- saying is: "wouldn't it be great if I could have free reign; like with self-funding but without assuming 100% of the risk."
Same reason democracy works better in small countries with highly educated population.