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Comment by dublinben | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to see an indie studio like this providing something more than pre-orders and deluxe editions to backers. If we're not getting any equity for the money, at least the product should be freely released upon completion.

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Investment crowdfunding was, until very recently, highly illegal. It's present legal standing is complex and most crowdfunding platforms, like Kickstarter, have deliberately avoided it, for good reason.

A freely-released product would be very expensive for the developer. The crowdfunding would have to cover all of the development costs, since the project would have no further direct revenue. There's probably a clever way to fund a free-to-play or DLC-supported platform that way, but that only makes sense for a subset of games.

For some strange reason most people in Germany misunderstood Crowdfunding with Crowdinvesting and so we have a lot of Crowdinvesting platforms like Companisto, Seedmatch, Bergfürst...

Your "equity" takes the form of the experience of a product you wanted that otherwise never would have existed. It may not be liquid, but it has value.

> If we're not getting any equity for the money, at least the product should be freely released upon completion.

Whoa, what? You've just described every single Kickstarter. Sounds like you have a problem with Kickstarter, not this campaign.

Isn't WeFunder your target?

>You've just described every single Kickstarter.

Not at all. There have been numerous campaigns that released their product to the community upon reaching their goal, like Cards Against Humanity, The Pirate Bay - AFK documentary, the Open Goldberg Variations, and many more projects.

http://www.kickstarter.com/pages/creativecommons

Notice that none of those are video games. It's great that lots of creative work is being licensed under CC BY-NC-SA, or even CC BY in a few cases. But most of those have something else they can sell later, like a physical book or cards, or are otherwise able to completely fund the entire process from the pledges. So they were able to open-source the product, have a free version, and still make enough to survive. That's not quite the same thing as completely releasing an entire game for free, although they may appear similar at first glance.

I was wondering the same thing. 10 k allows to be credited as supporting producer (together with a dinner) but producers get an interest over sales.

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