Shift 2 Unleashed is brilliant. If you love your real racing sims then go and buy it, no question. You may or may not know the site NoGripRacing but it's a modding forum for driving games and I was impressed to see that two of the coders from SMS had decided to join in the discussion on the forums there to provide feedback, but I was astonished to find a seed had been planted that is looking to grow. One forum member asked if they planned to make a rally game and they replied there was no publisher interest but they wanted to. Now they are drawing up plans to have people invest in a game and they will get the toolset to create a new driving game with them AND get a share of the profits!

I don't think it's been done in this way before. Fan funding has been done in the sense that people can prepay for a game before it's made. Or pay for a beta which helps further development. But my idea is to let anyone interested invest in the development both financially and with their time if they want. We would ship a full toolset to all subscribers. Ship a build at least weekly with source code at the app level for those so inclined to have a tinker there.

Our lawyer is working on the terms and conditions so this is going to happen

(We're over 1 million now adding in your possible on top of friends who have called wanting to invest. I haven't mentioned it beyond here and VirtualR). Becoming the biggest developer on earth overnight would be newsworthy, which would pull in more investors. We suspect we might even get banks in looking for a 200-500%+ return in 18 months. Imagine we sell 2 million units of the final game (Shift 1 did 5 million and Shift 2 is tracking well also). The revenue from those sales is approx. 70 million dollars. 5-7 million dev cost and a few more million for marketing and we're still looking at a very healthy return for the investors.

Wow, ambitious I think you will agree. You can read the full thread here.

This could turn out to be amazing. It's ambitious, but I don't see any reason why it would fail. I guess my only question is, what is the barrier to entry on becoming an investor? I'd love to receive builds of the game to perhaps help develop features with, or at least try.

This does look like a really good opportunity, and I'm currently considering how much of my redundancy money I want to invest in this!

It's a long thread obviously :) Lots of people excited about it. Ian Bell posted it on page 11. I think you will have to wait for the T&C's to be drawn up before you can actually pony up the cash.

http://www.nogripracing.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1348760&postcount=507

The investment thread is here:

http://www.nogripracing.com/forum/showthread.php?t=249418

Yay! Thanks for the link... I might invest something. Like 200-300 EUR.

Now don't laugh! Its all I have atm from my schoolarship, hopefully more will arrive soon! :D

Now if only Bioware would do something like this...

I have to admit that this is interesting. I haven't money for such things at the moment, but with classes ending at the end of the month, I should be getting a new job pretty soon. If they're still doing it at that point, I might consider contributing. I love race games.

So is this similar to the AAA indie concept of Interstellar Marines? It seems similar (fans investing in the game though I don't know if the interstellar marines ones allows for fan contribution to the work).

Okay, so far it seems that the minumum amount to invest would be 10 EUR. Not something I'm looking for, I hope they offer different packages of goodies depending on what you invest.

If there is some kind of profit in it, I'll be all over it, but if its just the Kickstarter kind of investment where you get special editions of the game, you're in the credits, or something similar, I'll pass.