You may have heard about this...Double Fine Productions (Tim Schafer's company - he of Full Throttle, Grim Fandango etc), in the past responsible for the amazing Psychonauts, has tried to pitch a traditional 2D adventure game to publishers for years and never got any response. So, they decided to take a different route: they apppealed to fans and sympathizers to provide small financial contributions, so that they may reach their total of 400.000 dollar they needed to make such a game (since it's a 2D adventure it's cheap, for a game).
They put up their Kickstarter page in the hopes to get 400.000 in a month. What happened instead is they cleared 400.000 in 8 hours, reached a million in 24 hours and are now, 3-4 days in, sitting at around 1.800.000 dollar. And there's about 30 days to go stilll...naturally, the donation speed will not pick up much now, probably just become less and less, but it's still a remarkable result.
You gotta see the relative importance of this: a company says "we want to make this game that no publisher wants to take a risk on" and reaches out to the fans, and they respond en masse, financing the (small) game in a matter of hours. Naturally, the financers get a copy of the finished game and some other shit if they gave a LOT of money, but since the only thing they know so far is that it's gonna be a 2d adventure game and that it's made by Schafer and co, that's more of a promise than a real preorder. Does this open the door for a few supposedly "dead" genres? I'm talking some TBS games, adventures, and (for most of us here) isometric party-based RPG's in the sense of the old Infinity Engine. The reason they don't exist is not because there's no crowd there, it's because publishers don't want to take any risks on them.
But this cuts out the publishers alltogether. There's been rumours now of Chris Avellone (of Planescape: Torment fame) and Obsidian considering putting up a kickstarter for a project like that, following the instant success of the Double Fine game. I don't want to OVERstate the importance of this event, since even 2 million is not a lot of money and a long way from an 'average' budget to make a game, and there are some sidenotes here (like, if this wasn't Schafer or Avellone, no one would care), but even so...no publisher telling them to cut shit because it's "too risky" or "doesn't fit the market audience", no artifical time constraints ("gotta hit the christmas period") and almost complete creative freedom. Could this be a thing in the future?
I guess we'll only really know once they start crowdsourcing money for bigger projects - like around the 10-20 million mark. The fact that the big rush on the Double Fine kickstarter is over could be due to a general loss of momentum, but also because people just go "we're way over the 400k mark already, not gonna give money too now". It's hard to tell. But it's really cool that the internet is financing games, instead of some leech publisher who only wants uninspired sequel CoD 53 to make sure it sells.
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