For a couple of years now, a crowd-funding efforts for music, movies, video games and comics have taken advantage of the arrival of affordable desktop 3D printers and print services to create unique premium perks related to their projects-in-development that in the past would have cost thousands of dollars with minimum order runs in the tens of thousands.

A new trend has started to appear where projects — even those skewing much more to bits than atoms — will embed 3D model files themselves in their project pitches. What’s more, in some cases those with a 3D printer can download and produce the models themselves, reducing production costs for giveaways to pennies. This trajectory suggests that in the future projects of all sorts will document their elements with embeddable and downloadable 3D models, an interesting challenge for the rise of “Mouseless” tablets and phones as a dominant mode of browsing on the Internet.

And for fun, here’s a quick run-down of “Defend the Fawkin Station” where we noticed a Sketchfab embed:

We wanted to create a game which featured a mixture of several genres in ways we hadn’t seen before, specially in mobile phones and tablets. The game had to be fun, hectic, strategic, and have great replayability. We have seen our good share of games. We wanted to see a game that combined player accuracy, strategy, and tower defense elements, and mix all that in a fun sci-fi space setting.

Read more.

Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!