Earlier this week, veteran developer Tim Schafer announced that his company, Double Fine, wanted to make an adventure game - a genre often lamented as being dead before its time - but that it wanted to secure funding for the game through unconventional means. Schafer launched an effort on Kickstarter, a funding site, aiming to raise $400,000 from the company's fans to fund development. At the time of writing, the effort has far exceeded that figure. Double Fine has the money to make its game, extracted entirely from the company's own fanbase without the slightest bit of involvement from traditional funding sources like publishers or venture capitalists.

This is crowdfunding - the logical evolution of crowdsourcing. What began as an effort to aggregate the spare computing power of volunteers and expanded into the aggregation of their spare brain power has posed a new question - can we aggregate the spare money in their bank accounts? The answer, it would seem, is yes.

Crowdfunding poses absolutely enormous questions not just for videogames, but for the entire structure of our economy - particularly our creative industries. Of course, Schafer's success is a fringe case . . .