The idea of starting off being 'crowd funded' to put out your first couple of releases until the big money investors decide you're worth risking anything on is how almost all artists across mediums do things in a capitalist system. As someone from a music background, the parallels between a band scraping together enough money and time to self produce a demo or an EP vs. an indie studio working on a game after work hours is pretty strong.

Honestly, the patron model is probably the best solution that I've seen. The problem is that it's become so tied into patrons receiving weekly updates or rewards that it's hard to turn that viewpoint towards longer term projects that don't necessarily lend themselves to those kinds of short term updates.