KickStarter En Route To $300 Million For 2012

If you've been living under a rock or you just don't like keeping up with the news about games not published by an AAA studio, then you might have missed out on this little thing called KickStarter, it's a crowd-source funded mediator of sorts that enables creative minds to explore ideas and projects with the help of a meta-community (or fans).

KickStarter, for gaming, has proven to be widely successful with long-time developer Tim Schafer and his studio Double Fine quickly surpassing the $1 million mark within a few days and inXile Entertainment also racking up more than a $2 million for Wasteland 2. However, KickStarter isn't all about video games, according to an article from VentureBeat the crowd-sourced company is expected to jettison past the $300 million dollar mark in 2012 thanks to people being more passionate about things they want to see get done more than ever before. Or more-so, because a lot of people are fed up with corporate higher-ups simply not making a lot of products worth buying.

Despite hearing about the huge success of games via KickStarter (mainly because the genre is relatively new to the service despite KickStarter being around since 2008), the real money-maker is the film section, racking up more than 33% of the total funds accrued through the mediator. A complete breakdown of the stats is as follows...

Film — 33%

Music — 21%

Design — 11%

Art — 6%

Publishing — 5%

Games — 5%

Technology — 5%

Theater — 4%

Food — 3%

Comics — 3%

Photography — 2%

Fashion — 1%

Dance — 1%

GameIndustry.biz also has a snazzy per-dollar breakdown of which section has amassed what amount since February of this year, and the numbers are as follows...

Film - $50.8m

Music - $32.5m

Design - $17.5m

Art - $8.8m

Publishing - $8.2m

Games - $8m

Technology - $7.9m

Theater - $6.5m

Food - $5m

Comics - $4m

Photography - $3.4m

Fashion - $2m

Dance - $1.6m

The numbers for games is expected to rise sharply throughout the year, especially as more high profile projects make their way onto KickStarter. There is even some speculation rummaging throughout the inner circles of gaming that former Microsoft Games poster-boy, Peter Molyneux, might take to KickStarter with new-found indie company 22Cans at some point in the future.

Right now the Pebble Smartwatch is the highest grossing crowd-sourced project on KickStarter, sitting pretty at $5 million, as reported by the Social Times. So it's certainly no surprise that the $300 million figure is where it is for KickStarter, and with the company receiving a 5% kickback from every completed campaign, they're definitely making a killing off all these creative crowd-sourcing.