The idea I had for our group’s company has to do with independent video gaming. The basic premise is that developers who do not work for a large company (Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony) will be able to showcase their talents and the projects they are working on by submitting demos and games to our company. Our company then makes a database of the games and allows users to pay a small monthly fee to have access to these games. You then rate the games and they can be searched for by popularity, newest added, a developer, name, genre, ect. The developers will then get paid by the proportion of people who play their games. So say developer A has x amount of hours of play time and gets paid y dollars, then if developer B as 3x amount of hours of play time they would receive 3y. This will help developers get noticed, see what others are doing, form bigger groups, get feedback, and possibly even get hired by a major company. There is more to it than that but that is the basic premise.
However, there are two other similar ideas out there that I have found. The first is called The Phantom. This idea is very similar to mine, also allowing a hardware cache they keeps the players favorite games in fast memory so it wouldn’t have to download from the internet. It never went very far because of lack of funding, pushed back release dates, and a very high monthly subscription.
Another, more popular idea similar to mine is the Xbox Live arcade. The major difference with this is this is created by people who are just starting out in programing with the company, and it shows games that they are working on as they become better to help out with the company. So it is under the umbrella of an already established video game giant, whereas my idea is to let freelance, potentially unhired game developers to get noticed.
