Crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo are really good at letting gamers give money to in-progress game projects that interest them. But they're pretty bad at sharing any eventual profits with the early "investors" that helped get the project going in the first place. Enter Fig, a new game crowdfunding site that will let gamers truly invest in upcoming games, offering a share of any revenues that eventually come from those projects after funding is complete.

That kind of revenue sharing comes with some significant strings for the time being; only Accredited Investors with at least $1 million in net assets can join in, and they have to invest at least $1,000. But Fig plans to open the investment plan up to regular gamers in the next few months, pursuant to a 2012 law that lowered the regulatory burden for everyday people to get into such markets.

Fig backers will also be able to go the more traditional crowdfunding route, contributing a small sum for rewards like game downloads and swag without any ownership stake. The service itself will take five percent from each project's crowdfunding revenue, much like Kickstarter, but it will also pocket five percent of a game's sales going forward after funding is complete. And despite the financial sharing, developers retain all intellectual property rights associated with their games.

Fig, which takes its name from LA's popular post-E3 hangout Hotel Figueroa, also differentiates itself from Kickstarter through a "curation" model, which limits the service to only one or two hand-selected projects at a time. That selection process is guided by an advisory board that includes some big names that have already seen great crowdfunding success, including Double Fine's Tim Schafer (Broken Age), Obsidian Entertainment's Feargus Urquhart (Pillars of Eternity), and inXile Entertainment's Brian Fargo (Wasteland 2). The service's first chosen project, Outer Wilds, is a space exploration title that already won the grand prize at last year's Independent Game Awards.

"If you look at Kickstarter, I never saw it coming four years ago," Fargo said in interview with Polygon. "I never would have dreamed we’d have an opportunity to go direct to our audience and say, hey, help us fund these great projects. Now, with equity... it’s not unreasonable to think these things might start going $10, $15 or even $20 million. Now we can make a different class of product."

It's certainly an interesting new direction for a game crowdfunding market that is seeing less interest from gamers in recent years. Early backers on services like Kickstarter already face significant risks when projects fail to meet expectations or go completely belly up . Fig's curation model attempts to limit those risks while also letting backers get some potential rewards in exchange for their early support.

Suddenly, the whole calculus of asking for money for an unproven idea is totally changed. Just imagine if the people who helped Oculus get off the ground with a $2.4 million Kickstarter got to enjoy some of the $2 billion windfall the company later got from Facebook, and you can see the potential for the model.