While I acknowledge that it doesn't seem to make economic sense, I have a great deal of respect for how people seem to be actually behaving. True nobodies can raise six figures on Kickstarter right now. I can only imagine what would happen if a somebody tried.
If Valve put HL3 on Kickstarter, might they raise the necessary funds? I kinda think they might.
Valve, with the original Half-Life didn't come completely out of nowhere, but it was pretty close. I am confident enough to say that it wouldn't have happened if they had to use a Kickstarter clone. I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, but I can't think of a case where a creative work running, say, $5,000,000 (which is a moderate movie budget, if you have examples from that medium) was pre-funded by a crowd of consumers (i.e., excluding patronage, which I think most would agree is not a desirable model to return to) as opposed to profit-seeking investors.
The recent success of numerous "indy" games, smartphone app games, and in particular Zynga indicate to me that success in the market with a low budget (read: not making 'AAA games') is still not only feasible, but common.
But the issue is how to do so without the ability to extract money from an "easily copied" work--that is, how to make it economically viable without copyright protections on the published end result. I find it unlikely that in this idealized no-copyright world, it is economically viable to devote a lot of time to building something that requires significant multidisciplinary effort (also read as "cash outlay for things you can't do yourself") with a relatively small investment up-front.
I find it likely that the Kickstarter/creatives-as-contractors model would end up not being worth my time, nor that of probably most people on HN; spending my time stumping for donations that barely cover production costs (else people ask why you aren't doing it for barely enough to cover production costs, why you're keeping "so much" in order to do those "eating" and "paying for gas" and "sleeping under a roof" things). Somebody else is more likely to pay me well enough to live--subsisting off the angels of consumers' better natures does not strike me as a winning proposition.
With copyright protections, it becomes economically plausible (not a guaranteed success, but plausible) for me to spend my time making something, even sinking my own money into it, because of the conviction that enough people will like it that I'll make back my nut and turn a profit as well. Y'know--capitalism.
And I find it extremely unlikely that those 'AAA titles'--which, as it happens, are often really really spectacularly good--would exist at all. Which would be a grievous, grievous shame. Skyrim is a beautiful game. Loads of fun, but more than that--just beautifully crafted.
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Alternatives such as Zynga are, to me, unpalatable, and are the "Facebook monstrosities" to which I referred elsewhere in this thread. Freemium games offer a terrible user experience and subscription games almost as bad. They may make a lot of money, but while I've talked a lot about economic viability in this thread, I do still have a vested interest in making great stuff. Making money and building great stuff are more at odds in the freemium and subscription models than in the more standard, "buy a license, play it" model.
It is my thought however that the harm done to society by these industries becoming diminished would be vastly outweighed by the positive aspects. We'll likely have to agree to disagree there.
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"Alternatives such as Zynga are, to me, unpalatable"
Oh trust me... I have no argument there.
Today, I can self-bootstrap by making smaller games and building up cash reserves, if I want. Or I can put away some money in my day job, like I am now, to actually build what I want to build and what I think will be well-received and make more value back for me than the money and time I'll need to sink into it to create it. Why would I risk my own money, and that much time, in a system where I'll get nothing back for it? (Subscription services are not a solution; not every game is World of Warcraft, and I'd argue that none should be.)
"I'm going to need $100,000 (or, for something where you'd actually have to hire multiple people, $X,000,000) to make a video game."
"Yeah, right. Don't let the door hit you on the way out."
While I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, every rebuttal to this I've ever seen requires a lot of handwaving and an assumption of active and knowledgeable participation on the part of end consumers. To be honest, I don't expect investor-level behavior out of consumers; I expect a lot of yelling about how something is X when they "already paid for" something very slightly but to them critically different than X, but not much in the way of useful, constructive development-centric criticism. It's not their bag.