Kickstarter Zeitgeist

Perhaps, like us, you’ve noticed that since the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter campaign, the crowd funding platform has gained a lot of momentum in the games industry.

New success stories emerge regularly, and there are now 10 games successfully funded that way beyond $500,000. Not a small feat!

We’ve been working on a Kickstarter project with a client, and as this progressed I grew very concerned that the popular perception of Kickstarter = success is not complete, and that anyone thinking of funding their project this way should look at it very closely before going there and asking for hundreds of thousands of dollars. There aren’t a lot of data points to check, so we decided to do some research to understand the platform and its current capacity better.

First off, I should say that our methodology limited our data. We had to draw a line on the size of the projects we looked at, and we don’t have any data on the ones that failed  (and that’s a real shame, as I believe this is the key information when you want to decide whether or not you should give this a shot). What we have is a snapshot of successful projects, but even this is quite helpful.

For instance, if you are trying to raise $250,000 for a PC game, you are trying to raise more money than the average PC game manages (that’s $233k). More importantly, you are trying to raise more than 10 times the median amount of money ($23k). Your project will need to be exceptionally attractive to pull this off.