If you look at what Valve does, it may be. With software companies being too big to challenge by themselves alone, with top specialists and budgets, they bet on open source to connect with every little player on the market and probably choose the direction it would evolve in the future as Steam revenue lets them be the bigger fish of that pond. And, for what they did with SD they made open source products accessible.

I feel like the problem here is funding full-time developers, marketing, so to convince moneybags to bankroll you on a product that people can build and modify. That’s not easy, but we saw, once again, Valve and others employ and support modders and other volounteers. So probably sticking to some platform or fundraising place may be a must. Passion projects may be endlessly cool but there is only so much you can do on your own and if it’s not a hit like Minecraft, the result would have that junky feeling not inviting a regular consumer at all.

One of the greater foes is intellectual property and getting one’s name known. There’s no way to put together a project with a lot of designs and voice acting for cheap because artists and actors usually want at least a mark in their portfolio and their contribution is not very cheap in commercial works (like IT doesn’t). They can do it as an act of charity or just for their name recognition, but it’s hard to suspect from top shelf personalities, and unless money are involved, the most probable source of talents is college students. That can hurt their output and quality.

Having said that, my first pick would be educational and casual products done for public funding. They usually don’t require overcomplicated mechanics, done in a cartoonish style that’s easier to replicate (although by a designer, so it stays tasteful) and are what many would find essential to be free and open source. I think it’s not the worst way to collect initial funding for more complicated products.