Good day everyone,

I am working on a PC game project that has 3 phases planned, micro, macro and mmo versions [if confused, see a brief description at the bottom].

I have found a potential investor for the micro version of the game, but naturally, he requested a detailed plan of how the game will pay back. And the problem is that micro version itself is not supposed to be monetized much, other than some ads and limited in-game currency utilization.

The idea is that with this combat demo already at hand, it should be possible to get a really large enough investment (millions of dollars) and use it to pay back the initial small one (thousands of dollars) and take the project into macro phase, which will really make profit. This way, everybody is going to win, provided that I can deliver the end-product.

Yet while I am confident of that both the conception of the macro and the real game-play of the micro versions are going to be appealing, I don’t know how to obtain any guarantee of that I will be able to get funded once I have the prototype ready. And without that, I won’t receive the funds for the prototype in the first place!

To summarize, my question is: how to figure out my future possibilities of getting funded once I have combat demo out, basically “whom to write to and what”.

Ideally, I would like some sort of a preliminary agreement with a game publisher, something that would basically state “If the developer provides the product in time and in quality corresponding to the specifications given, the publisher guarantees to allocate funds for distribution and further development, thereby acquiring the right to X part of all future profits”.

Does this sound sane? It’s just that I don’t want to sell all of my rights out straight away by taking a big outside investment while the project is in such early stage.

I would appreciate if you would share your thoughts on this kind of scheme, and be sure to ask questions as I am sure I must have forgotten to mention a ton of important things, like the fact that initial funds are going to be spent on outsourcing (living in Siberia is really just great).

[here’s a brief outline of what each version will feature]

[micro] 1) turn based tactical combat rules 2) character development 3) arena/tournament system

[macro] 4) ai-ruled dynamic interactive worlds 5) global map adventuring 6) strategic rpg + god simulator gameplay

[mmo] 7) Persistent worlds system 8) Social structures system (“guilds/clans”) 9) god-simulation on the mmo scale

P.S. Obviously, these features are incremental, so that mmo version has all 9.