Is the Street Performer Protocol feasible for commercial game development?

I posted this to the 'Business' forum at GameDev.net. I figure I've got nothing to lose posting it here as well. Comments and flames are welcome.

I'm considering making a game and releasing it using the Street Performer Protocol. For those who don't know what this is, I'll outline it here. Detailed information is available at http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue4_6/kelsey/ .

Essentially, the SPP is a reversal of traditional online marketing. The publisher announces that they have made (or are going to make) a product, be it music, a book, a game, whatever. They also announce that they will release the game for free once they have received a total of $(x) in donations. The money goes into a third party escrow account, and donors can get their money back if they choose (before the game is released, of course). Once the game is released, the money is released to the developers. The public gets their game, the developers get their money, everybody goes home happy.

The immediate benefits of such a method include:
[*] Piracy is a non-issue.
[*] Distribution is made extremely easy, via the Internet.
The major problem with the SPP is that people will opt to not donate and get a game for free. To avert this, I plan on offering extra 'goodies' to people who donate, such as technical support, merchandise, and previews of extra content.

My question is this: is this method of development feasible?

Feasable? Of course!

Profitable? Not really.
You'll make your money back, but you cap it at whatever your realase price is. But, I think it's a fine idea if it's a starting out game, especially because it would allow you to get copyrights and trademarks before its release with proper support. It might give you long enough time to make money without needing a bigger company sucking up 70% of your profit.

Are there any examples of such a game following this protocol? I kind
of agree with it being ideal and such, but not really too practical.
The game would likely have to be pretty small anyway, in which case
most people probably won't donate money.

It's worked before, but not for games (to my knowledge). The largest example (and the one the best springs to mind) is the Blender Foundation's work on getting the Blender 3D modelling and rendering kit made free under GPL.

Quoting the Wikipedia article:
? quoting Wikipedia
Originally, the program was developed as an in-house application by the Dutch animation studio NeoGeo; the main author, Ton Roosendaal, founded Not a Number Technologies (NaN) in June 1998 to further develop and distribute the program. The program was initially distributed as proprietary software available at no cost (freeware) until NaN went bankrupt in 2002. The debtors agreed to release Blender as free software, under the terms of the GNU General Public License, for a one-time payment of ?100,000. On July 18, 2002, a Blender funding campaign was started by Roosendaal in order to collect donations and on September 7, 2002 it was announced that enough funds had been collected and that the Blender source code would be released in October. Blender is now an actively developed open source program, the newest version being 2.34 that was published in August 5, 2004.

The SPP has worked in the past. I'm just wondering if it'll work on something like a game.

Crono said:
You'll make your money back, but you cap it at whatever your realase price is.

Think expansion packs. Think sequels. Think '$50 for us to release this new level/mission/monster' offers. Etc. It's not a one-shot deal.

Right now my biggest concern is thinking of ways to entice people to donate. What's needed is things that don't actually cost me too much to produce - services such as tech support, preview content, and the rest - and things that can be easily distributed. So far I've thought of merchandising, assuming I can get an affordable bulk deal for the items. (A bonus element of merchandising is that anything that isn't given to donors could be sold traditionally to anyone else.)

Any ideas?

If they donate, I could promise to leave them and their families alone. That way it's only costing me.

You could have extra bonus missions/whatever, maybe interesting game-related movies/cutscenes. People dig the movies. Obviously I have no idea how much these things would cost to produce. Fun facts are always... fun, too.

Movies wouldn't be too hard. I'd just shoot some footage of gameplay and slap a logo on it :razz:

Sounds like a good idea if you can get people excited about the product. I mean, HL2 could have raked in millions this way on pure anticipation, but it seems to me that games only make it big because they have been played and reviewed an hooplaed to hell. Maybe if you could get a mainstream magazine to review it it would be a profitable endeavor, but otherwise I think not.