I am glad that more developers are deciding to do this and putting more control into the hands of their consumers. The biggest benefit to the developer here is

I am glad that more developers are deciding to do this and putting more control into the hands of their consumers. The biggest benefit to the developer here is that they have paid for initial development up front AND they get to sell this game on Steam and other market places once it releases. Even with a moderate PR push from any one of these companies if they sell 100K copies at 10 dollars a piece (or even less) they have come out WAY ahead on this project. Obviously a big publisher like Activision or EA is going to scoff at something like a 10 Million dollar profit when they need to fund the rest of their operations + split that revenue with the developer. They take risks but only when they know the chances of meeting their return percentage is higher than a certain threshold. What was the last game you can remember from a big publisher that took a huge risk?