Fig also has a really, errm, interesting corporate structure. Basically, investors get non-voting shares in a Fig subsidiary whose upside is capped at some fixed proportion of the income from the game, with Fig acting as the publisher - except without any of the usual tools such as IP ownership that publishers use to ensure games they invest money in pay up. Investors themselves also don't appear to have any standing to sue if the game developers simply refuse to pay up. There's also conflicts of interest all over the place between Fig, its subsidiary, and the developers it's handing over money to, with huge overlaps in board membership. The information for investors made for very interesting reading, though I do wonder how many investors actually read it.
upside is capped at some fixed proportion of the income from the game
That's not usually what people mean by a capped upside. In a context like this I would take a "cap" to mean something like "your shares can't be worth more than 5x what you paid for them".
Ah. I think it got lost in editing, but the problem is that the same doesn't apply to your potential losses - if any of the games backed by Fig fails badly enough, or if Fig itself fails, you can lose your entire investment as a result, even though you won't see a penny of the returns from the other games if they succeed.
