I came upon this website, that launched today.

Important! read the FAQ of gambitious before you want to invest in a game!

FAQ: http://gambitious.com/faqs
Homepage of Gambitious: http://gambitious.com/

Just a FYI: the links direct back to the thread.

Fixed :) Tanks!

Much better :)
Anyway, the initiative looks nice, but I'm not sure the market needs/is ready for another crowdsourcing platform. We shall see.

Hrm, how much y'all wanna bet that this becomes the "new thing"? [the starting of kickstarter copies, not kickstarting - that is already a 'new thing"]

The market do need it for European projects...cause with Kickstarter you need to be in US to submit a game ;)

Well there is a bit of a notable difference from Kickstarter with this one: You're actually investing your money and get some kind of stake in the company.

That's a pretty substantial difference. I guess that makes it sort of like quirky.com for games.

Which is why I think it will fail miserably. The reason Kickstarter and the other websites work, is that people invest because they want to see the project get made, and the project creator retains complete ownership over their project and profits.
However, if dividends are split between backers, there will surely be little left for the project creator to build their company and future services, and people will be less willing to take risks with ambitious or unusual projects; we might as well buy shares with a publisher.

We already have European equivalents to Kickstarter (see Rockethub, for instance), and we just need people to use those. Gambitious isn't it.

I don't agree, quirky seems to be doing just fine, it's all going to depend upon how things end up shaking out. I wouldn't recommend writing it off just yet.

Also, why would you assume that the dividends would be that costly? Presumably they'll be based upon the sales of the funded project and I doubt very much that it's going to be the norm to give away all the proceeds.

Of course it could well fail, but I think painting a bleak picture before anything's paid out let alone been funded is a bit silly.

Not sure how this launched so long ago when Mashable says it just launched today.

Either way, I'm happy about it. I've always said that my problem with things like kickstarter is that you're helping eliminate the risk for businesses without getting any of the reward in terms of equity. The fact that gambitious addresses that issue makes the whole thing a completely different, and far more appealing proposition.