Yesterday we rolled out news about how much Kickstarter made in general from crowd-sourced funding. The site has reportedly taken in close to $115 million from gaming enthusiasts, many of which funded board games and video games alike.
Games Industry International caught word from market research group ICO Partners, as they rolled out the numbers for 2013 regarding the money pledged to Kickstarter.
The games category actually happened to be the biggest category on the crowd-sourcing site, with the video game category alone racking in a total of $57,934,418 across 446 successfully Kickstarted projects. That's up from the $43,968,843 pledged across 297 projects in 2012.
The bubble hasn't popped... yet.
Thomas Bidaux from the ICO Partners UK firm, commented about the results, saying...
"To me, this looks like good news overall," he writes. "It shows a wider selection of projects can get funded via Kickstarter, and not just the very cheap or the very famous...I think this evolution stems from the development of a community of video game enthusiasts embracing the crowd funding principles. A growth from the bottom up sounds a lot healthier overall."
Gamers seem to be smitten with interest as far as crowd-funding goes, especially given that many of them recognize that without Kickstarter many of these projects would simply not exist at all.
Video games weren't the only form of games reaping big bucks, though. The board game sector is still a very important part of the crowd-funding model as well, racking in approximately $55 million in crowd-funding as well, which has pushed the overall games category on Kickstarter over the $100 million mark, making it the most used and successful category on the site.
Bidaux commented to GI.biz that...
"So far, there have been 5.4m individual people that have backed a project on Kickstarter," ... "However, there have only been about 800,000 individuals backing a video game project. It is impressive that so much money has been pledged for video games considering that number of individual backers. They gave, on average, $120 to video games each. It also means that 10 per cent of them have backed Double Fine Adventures."
This spells good things for the future of the independent video game sector. Gamers are now trusting developers directly to pump out the kind of games they would like to play, and developers are taking some measure of confidence to the crowd-sourcing space in order to do the sort of games the major publishers just won't back.
Of course, Games Industry also wrote about how Kickstarter isn't quite there yet to completely replace the traditional publishing model, but we're definitely getting close.
With highlighted projects like The Banner Saga, Project Phoenix and Hyper Light Drifter on the horizon – and not just for PC, but for home consoles as well – there are definitely good times ahead for those who pledged and those who feel Kickstarter offers a great alternative to playing the typical, cut-content, Hollywood blockbuster from the generic AAA publisher.
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