We’re all getting more and more familiar with Kickstarter (online crowd-sourcing), but did you know how important Kickstarter was to the world of gaming?
In 2012, 23% of all dollars pledged were to games! This consists of board and video games, but it’s still amazing! $50 million were pledged to games last year, while only $42 million was pledged to films, making gaming and filming the number 1 and 2 categories on Kickstarter.
Perspective
In 2009, when Kickstarter was still a baby, only $48,190 was pledged to gaming. It grew to $519, 885 in 2010 and to $3,615,841 in 2011 – but over $50 million in 2012 is an insane jump! That’s a 1391% increase from the year before – OR it’s a 104,441% increase over 4 years! Wow!!
What about Board Gaming?
Over $15 million of that is for board gaming. While that’s a smaller piece of the pie compared to video games, board games are being funded successfully 47% of the time, while video games are only being funded successfully 23% of the time.
Why?
A big benefit of Kickstarter is that the more people that pledge a campaign – then the more people they tell (to help hit Stretch Goals) and the more people become aware of the whole crowd-sourcing industry. Some successfully funded campaigns start to build and spread like wildfire. Dungeon Roll, Ogre, Machine of Death all come to mind. By offering Kickstarter exclusives, or more game/goodies for the same price, it becomes more and more lucrative for new backers to pledge and support a game.
In some future posts we’ll take a look at the difference between a game that barely gets funded to one that is enormously successful!
-Jay Cormier
(information gathered from Kickstarter)
Inspiration to Publication 