The night before heading to Germany for GCDC, I was lucky enough to attend the Sarah McLachlan concert that was in town. My wife is a huge fan, and we thoroughly enjoyed the show (as did about 12000 other fans)!

What I thought was interesting was the opening act, Butterfly Boucher. Standard strong chic singing stuff, but she’s a relatively unknown artist hailing from Australia. She was spotted by Sarah a while back in a New York club and was asked to come on tour to be the opening act. Lucky her. It was an true contrast to see her egging on the audience to beat the post-show CDs sales of 520 units she did at the Philadelphia show - versus Sarah, the multimillion record selling big league artist.

And yet, here she was, enjoying the same audience/exposure as Sarah was… Now, I have no clue to what extent Butterfly is operating in “starving artist mode”, but this all relates directly to my previous comments on the game industry being all center with no margins… Then again, Sarah is somewhat more progressive in fostering new (female) talent, having started Lilith Fair a few years back.

The only thing that comes to mind that is somewhat reflective of this in the games biz, is Valve shipping the Counter-Strike Source mod/game with Half-Life 2. But, Counter-Strike is such a successful mod/game that I don’t think it would count in this sense.

So, where is gaming’s opening act? Or, better yet, where is gaming’s Sarah?

(Ironically, my keynote lecture for GCDC will be about the economies of IP, licenses vs original content and how to support innovation.)