The business side of video game development tends to be viewed in a negative light at times. Industry professionals and fans acknowledge that some decisions made in game development sacrifice a developer’s vision in order to make an IP more profitable. The reality is most publishers are multi-million dollar corporations, whose stock holders invest a great deal of money into ideas and expect an equitable return on that investment. Independent developers who choose to forgo the harsh realities of working with publishers don’t have to worry about this pressure of appeasing stock holders. Instead, they are challenged with the task of finding a private investor to keep the development team running until the game is complete. Sometimes it is someone personally invested in the developer, other times it can be a local bank or credit union, and other times it is the developer themselves. In this quickly evolving industry there is a new channel for developers to find this funding using the Internet, through a process called crowdfunding.
