I would take whatever I needed to set up an office, and start hunting for developers. I wouldn't put together a superteam, but hire unknown Flash designers, game design school dropouts, and any sort of creative professional in a dead-end job, and give 200 of them $25,000 and 3 months to create a playable proof of concept. Including my own expenses to get this running, I'm down $6m and have 200 concepts.
Instead of personally picking the best concepts, they would be shown in different public forums (arcade-like settings, web sites). Any game that generated buzz, that developer would then be given a $500,000 budget and 6 months to create a game. Even if all 200 concepts were awesome, this would only be a $100m expense. More realistically, if 50 concepts were worthwhile, even with the expenses to rent public spaces, advertise, build and operate the web site, I'm down maybe $30m.
Obviously, a $500K budget would not hire more than a small team for 6 months, but then again the idea is not to just hand out money and expect great results. $500K and 6 months is enough to create a classic web-based or arcade-type game. Again, these games would be shown in public forums, and this time maybe 10 would come through. Those 10 would now have $3m and a year to develop games; enough to develop for Wii, DS, Steam, etc. They would not be limited to their initial concept at this point.
I would be able to repeat this experiment at least 5 times, probably at 5-6 year intervals.
I'd like to think that $500m could make more than another forgettable "HD epic." That's enough to live your entire life comfortably, and just maybe, if you can figure out how to be profitable along the way, walk away as the owner of a major game publisher, with a sizable group of studios, each with a visionary leader.
"[Our former customers] are unable to find software which they WANT to play."
"The way to solve this problem lies in how to communicate what kind of games [they CAN play]."
Satoru Iwata, Nintendo President. Only slightly paraphrased.
