It seems like we can’t get enough of Kickstarted games. Industry analysts ICO are reporting figures that show around 30 per cent more video game campaigns were successfully funded last year than in 2012. Even better for developers using the system, total money pledged also rose 30%.
There’s no sign of Kickstarter slowing down either, with big hitters like Torment: Tides of Numenara, Pillars of Eternity and Broken Age on the way.
Thomas Bidaux of ICO crunched the numbers on last year’s Kickstarter campaigns, and noted the excellent performance of board games and video games in particular. Video game campaigns raised the ridiculous sum of $57,934,418 in donations from 446 successfully funded projects last year, a rise of roughly one third from 2012. Bidaux did, however, sound a note of caution for ambitious developers despite those encouraging figures.
Kickstarter is a platform that is perfect for projects that don’t aim for the moon, but promise a quality experience for the amount they ask for. I get to review a lot of projects on a regular basis from video games studios since I have started blogging about the crowdfunding of games – the vast majority of them are simply too ambitious and too expensive when considering the studio’s track record and its reputation. This is not the only point of failure there is, but this does seems to be the most common.
So, if I have a wish for games on Kickstarter for 2014, it might be “be more humble, be more successful”.
