The FTC imposes a fine on a board game creator who failed to deliver their Kickstarter.
Developers publicly wring their hands about the reports of high refund rates on Steam.
Everyone looks to VR, but there’s already people asking whether it is a bubble.
What’s going on?
There are two business models: sell something in advance using promises, and persuade a lot of people who might not like a product a lot; or give the product cheaply and charge after the fact.
Here are some basic facts of life regarding these two models.
A funder of some sort ponies up the money so that a creative can eat while they work. Sometimes this is self-funding, sometimes it’s an advance, sometimes it’s patronage.
A creator actually makes the artwork.
An editor serves the role of gatekeeper and quality check, deciding what makes it further up the ladder. They serve in a curatorial role not just for the sake of gatekeeping but also to keep the overall market from being impossible to navigate, and to maximize the revenue from a given work.
Marketing channels make it possible for the artwork to be seen by the public: reviews, trade magazines, ads. This is how the public finds out something even exists.
Stores then retail the packaged form of the artwork to the end customer. Stores have their own branding task, and likely serve as a curatorial and recommendation engine all over again, this time trying to find the right fit for the customer.
The audience then gets to experience the work.
Re-users then take the creation and restart the process in alternate forms; adaptations to movies, audiobooks, classic game packages, what have you.