I think folks like Beamer consider this initial venture capital as the teat from which his employment is suckled, and not from the actual product sales. By reading those blogs, its apparent that many game studios do as well.
The studios don't think this, they just don't have business-minded people. Most studios are run by the creative people. They have no formal business education and have never really had the opportunity to pick it up. They don't have solid business plans, they don't have solid financial goals, etc. Somehow the VCs don't step up, which confuses me. I'm not sure what the deal is, but assume a lot of VCs get swayed by WoW and don't really understand the way the industry works, so they lose a ton of money. You're going to see a shift to seeing the CEOs, or at least presidents, being outside business guys pulled in rather than inside creative guys promoted. I cited Valve and Epic as smart businesses - Gabe Newell learned fiscal responsibility at Microsoft after Harvard and Mike Capps is multidegreed, including MIT. Brilliant guys that are involved in the creative side and capable programmers but also have great business sense. id went and pulled Todd Hollenshead out of Arthur Anderson where he was a consultant. I think more studios will be doing similar things. It isn't about finding "bean counters," which you can never accuse the above three as being, but about finding people with solid business training that absolutely love making games. People that understand when to say "yes, let's do that, it's worth the risk" and people that know when to say "that's really cool, but we can't afford it for this release."
So I'm not sure why I got lumped into this. My ideal job would actually be to end up at the VC doing the funding rather than the company receiving it.