Back in the late 90s, my partner and I were getting a startup game development company funded. I pitched quite a few VCs, and ran into this same problem. The ty

Back in the late 90s, my partner and I were getting a startup game development company funded. I pitched quite a few VCs, and ran into this same problem. The typical objection was "The game business is like the music business -- it's based on hits, and we're not confident we can predict those." And it's true, from the VC perspective. A game developer often creates each new game from scratch, so it's not like a traditional product that is created once, then enhanced and refined over time. Each new game is a fresh new chance to fail. Maybe these days a middleware startup could get VC funding, since they create a product that's used to make games, but not the games themselves. In the end, after I accumulated a stack of more than 60 rejections from VCs, we got our funding from a traditional computer game publisher.