> But how do you crowdsource money for your first, without going with the "traditional" media industry?
You work for free or very little money either by having a day job or living the life of a starving artist. Nobody is going to fund your first game, because your first game is going to be terrible. Heck, your first half dozen games are probably going to be terrible. People like to think of guys like Notch (Minecraft) or Edmund Mcmillen (Super Meat Boy) as overnight successes, but they made games for a long time before they made it big. If you are lucky, you can scrape enough together in your early career to pay your rent and eat. Heck even the legendary John Carmack was making little games for Softdisk then the commander keen games before id struck gold with Wolfenstien and Doom.
Fwiw, the Edmund Mcmillen example isn't really accurate; he made a considerable amount of money from his previous game, the IGF-award-winner Gish, that he co-developed with Alex Austin and Josiah Pisciotta. Super Meat Boy was his follow-up.
Gish only made sales of $120k[1]. Edwin worked with a publisher and as you mentioned worked with other people, so I don't think he made a considerable amount of money there. In interviews and podcasts he frequently mentions being 'poor' for a long time while making games.
Even disregarding all that, he was making games before he made Gish, so the example still holds.
My point was, nobody is going to pay you while you practice, unless you get a job with BigCorp as part of a team and work your way up.
You work for free or very little money either by having a day job or living the life of a starving artist. Nobody is going to fund your first game, because your first game is going to be terrible. Heck, your first half dozen games are probably going to be terrible. People like to think of guys like Notch (Minecraft) or Edmund Mcmillen (Super Meat Boy) as overnight successes, but they made games for a long time before they made it big. If you are lucky, you can scrape enough together in your early career to pay your rent and eat. Heck even the legendary John Carmack was making little games for Softdisk then the commander keen games before id struck gold with Wolfenstien and Doom.