Big publishers have their eyes on Kickstarter, the crowdsourcing phenomenon, and want a piece of the action. Obsidian Entertainment’s CEO Feargus Urquhart, whose Project Eternity has been immensely successful, tells one such story on the project’s Kickstarter forum:

We were actually contacted by some publishers over the last few months that wanted to use us to do a Kickstarter. I said to them ‘So, you want us to do a Kickstarter for [you], using our name, we then get the Kickstarter money to make the game, you then publish the game, but we then don’t get to keep the brand we make and we only get a portion of the profits?’ They said, ‘Yes’.

I think they were trying, honestly, to be able to do something with us and they felt that was the easiest way to do it. They would then not need to go get budget approved and deal with the challenge of that. What I don’t think they did was to think about our side of it and what they were really asking.