Actually I do think you can both as long as you make social publishing tools an option or something you reward rather than an obligation. Make it easy for the evangelists to evangelize.

Spot on about how challenging it is to raise funds when you are a one game start up vs a one product start up. Its possible and we are proof of it but it takes some pretty smart and clued in investors.

Excellent post, thank you for sharing this great content.

Actually I would go one step further, if you want a game with a chance to make millions in revenues at some point, you need 150k from the start. 150k is for minimum viable product that has a chance to become a hit plus a few $ more to then fine tune. How much $ you need to fine tune depends on experience of the team and how close you got to something that works from a acquisition, retention and monetization level. Don't be surprised if that 150k should therefore be 200 or 300k $ And if your team is inexperienced (ie: ex AAA games team doing its first online game), you are going to need a lot more than 200k $ on that first game to have a chance to make it viable. And that assumes your game is so good it markets itself.

btw, you need a twitter share button

Great post as usual but simply put, the browser is the platform. Build your business accordingly or face diminishing market share.

I think this applies more to traditional game publishing than online game publishing but great post none the less. A perfect game project will have just the right funding yes but more importantly the key team members (rather than just a rockstar individual) must have worked before and ideally had one success and one failure together. Then you need a game concept that has real market potential.