Going Private

Individual investors might also be interested in putting their own money into ventures like yours. And they may not be as difficult to find as you might think. For example, owners of small to medium-sized businesses might be willing to diversify their portfolio and risk small amounts of money in projects such as videogames.

In practice, individual investors will rarely provide more than what is needed to build a prototype, which brings you back to the original problem: finding a publisher. Funding a complete project from beginning to end is out of reach for most individuals. Therefore, this is a quick method to get started on a game, but it is not suitable for large projects.

A word of warning: since individual investors are usually not very familiar with the industry, they might not be prepared to deal with the types of problems that every project encounters, such as delays when developing the demo, finding the publisher, signing a contract, and so forth. Make sure there are no misconceptions, or the relationship can quickly sour.