Crowdfunding becomes the gold rush du jour | 10 Years Ago This Month
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Thursday 24th February 2022
The games industry moves pretty fast, and there's a tendency for all involved to look constantly to what's next without so much worrying about what came before. That said, even an industry so entrenched in the now can learn from its past.
So to refresh our collective memory and perhaps offer some perspective on our field's history, GamesIndustry.biz runs this monthly feature highlighting happenings in gaming from exactly a decade ago.
Making and selling games is hard. But every now and then a shortcut appears that promises to change a key part of that and make the whole business of game development a little bit easier.
After the Xbox 360 launched in 2005, you were golden if you could just get your game on Xbox Live Arcade. A few years later, it was all about getting your game on Steam, or signing a deal with Sony during its indie-friendly Pub Fund phase. And after the Wii U flamed out, indie developers still willing to give Nintendo the time of day found a boost by being an early entrant on the Switch eShop. Social and mobile likewise beckoned developers with promises of untold riches and success stories of early movers.
By the time a "shortcut" with any actual effectiveness becomes conventional wisdom, it has been so widely embraced that whatever advantage it once conferred is gone
These days it might be about getting a game on Game Pass to guarantee a minimum level of success up front, or invoking the magic mix of metaverse and web 3.0 jargon to summon VCs with unconscionable amounts of money to burn.
Some of those promises are false from the outset and never change a thing. Others turn out to have a grain of truth to them, but only for a select group of people, or
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