[Kickstarter's earned plenty of funding for game developers over the past several months, but will this new-found funding model last? Gamasutra contributor Nicholas Lovell provides his thoughts on the matter and outlines some imporants risks developers and backers need to be aware of.]
2012 has seen an unprecedented level of euphoria over crowdfunding sites. Regular readers of Gamasutra will know that Double Fine raised $3,335,265 in a record-breaking campaign to produce a game about which purchasers knew very little, except that it would be a point-and-click adventure created by two of the doyens of that industry: Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert. Then InXile CEO and Interplay founder Brian Fargo followed the example, raising $2.9m to fund a sequel to 1988 game Wasteland.
Not only have two games that traditional publishers wouldn't touch now been funded by fans, but they appear to have opened the floodgates to other Kickstarter projects. In a recent blog post, Kickstarter said that blockbuster projects draw more people into the crowdfunding ecosystem. Successful, large-scale fund-raisers don't suck up all the available money; they increase the number of people funding projects, increasing the pool of potential funders for other projects. Kickstarter's key statistics:
- In the first two years of Kickstarter, the Video Games category saw pledges of $1,776,372. In the six weeks after the Double Fine project was announced, $2,890,704 was pledged (if you added Double Fine's amount to that, you get $6,227,075.)
- Before Double Fine, one video game project had exceeded $100,000. By March 29, 2012, nine projects had.
- In the month before Double Fine, the Video Games category averaged 629 pledges a week; after (but excluding) Double Fine, that jumped to 9,755 pledges per week.
- $2,000 just didn't turn up (payments didn't transfer) and when Amazon and Kickstarter took their fees, Warballoon got $32,000.
- Prizes cost $10,000! Much more than Warballoon was expecting. (Note to Kickstarters: do your costings carefully, and remember to include postage halfway round the globe.)
- Then: music ($6,000), legal and accounting fees to set up the business ($4,000), poster art ($2,000), iPads ($1,000), attending PAX East ($3,000)
- Leaving $6,000 for development. Which was taxed, leaving $4,000.