My brother runs a company with over a dozen employees and has published two games on Steam. Despite the size of the company, he doesn't own an office. He also doesn't have a college degree. He started the company when he was a teenager and dropped out of high school to work full-time on it.
My brother's company is entirely Internet-based. Everybody lives in a different state. A few employees live outside of the country. The employees communicate with each other and hold meetings over Skype. They synchronize their work using SVN version control software. They receive paychecks through PayPal, and more recently through online bank transfers. They advertise the game through Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube on a marketing budget of zero dollars. Most of the website, blog, and forums were built by my brother (who has never taken a programming class and does not consider himself a programmer).
This is the sort of thing that would have been impossible twenty years ago. Companies used to sell computers and software through large retail outlets like department stores and mail-order catalogs. The manufacturer had to convince the retailer that the product was able to be sold to a wide audience. Without a distribution platform, a product could not be mass-produced and sold to customers. Today high-volume retail platforms still exist and are helpful, but my brother's company got by for a year using nothing but Kickstarter and PayPal transactions. Customers came to the website, bought a game directly, and downloaded their copy of the game from the company's web server. Business is rapidly changing to fit this new direct-to-consumer market, and the barrier for entry has never been lower.
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