It works in music though

A friend of mine runs a small music label in Italy ( https://www.heavypsychsounds.com/ ) in the stoner segment and had some success printing vinyls in limited edition of the bands he publish

You have to create your fan base first, but usually when you build it from the ground up it's loyal and buys everything you print

He makes enough to sustain a small business and had the satisfaction of getting in touch with the bands he once listened to when he was younger and to republish them (Nebula, Nick Oliveri from QOTSA, Brant Bjork from Kyuss)

It works for the label, but does it enable the artists to live off of their music? I doubt it.

Most musicians live off the money they make touring and performing. It's rare that a musician makes enough money off of record sales alone.

if the artists can't live making their music, the label can't publish them

BTW in this specific case the bands get the full cachet for the live gigs and the merch they sell at the venues, the label pays for the pressing and gets its own share from selling the records and from the merch sold on the label's website

It's a small business, not a shady multi billion company

it's made out of passion, not for greed

You can make a pretty professional album with a band of five people and a few thousand dollars in equipment. Game budgets regularly breach 10s of millions.

The game development business it's very similar to music industry right now

many small indie actors, few giant ones

minecraft was created by a single developer, angry birds costed officially around 100K, both made hundreds of millions

putting up a band that sells records in the tens of millions doesn't cost less than making angry birds

and it's harder to get to that point, band that sells so many records are just a few

For example Lady gaga sold globally less than 9 millions records, Angry Birds has exceeded 12 millions

As time goes on, I think game development will come to be more and more dominated by hobbyists. With the amount of games out there, it becomes harder and harder to make a case for trying to start your own studio.

It's like with music or movies or novels; you're taking a huge risk by quitting your job to do it full time. The sad thing is that it was only a few years ago when it actually did make some sense to try it.

One counter example; time will tell whether this will be sustainable: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/morphcat-games/micro-ma...

(Keep in mind that 150000 EUR might be "beer money" in the US, but the typical German salary for a non managerial SW engineer is around 60000 EUR, so 150000 EUR are 2 "good" man years' worth of money).

I agree with both you and with GP.

It's more of a "feel good" symbolic support model, and that's great! There should be a place for that in our lives too.

Being paid for working on something that ultimately isn't about the money is actually a really tricky problem to solve, and this feels like a decent approach.