Kickstarter

For those who haven't heard of it Kickstarter is a website where people can post a request for donations. Mainly used for artistic projects, kickstarter allows a creator to reach out to their audience directly and ask for donations, without having to go though a publisher. As much as I dislike applying Darwinism to things that aren't evolution, I think in this case it shows that the projects that people are interested in and want to buy are the ones that get the most funding.

Take this project for example. Double Fine Adventure is a point and click adventure style computer game.  The Point and Click genre has been in decline in recent years, despite having a large community of fans. Publishers seem to think that those kind of games won't sell, so Double Fine Productions, which includes some of the founding fathers of the genre, decided to start a fundraiser for their project. Setting out to acquire $400 000 to develop the game, they gathered $3,336,371 as of this writing. They are video documenting the production of the game and gaining lots of publicity. It shows that reaching out to the fans directly is sometimes a better option than going to publishers who will tell you what you're doing will never sell.