You can argue till you’re blue in the teeth about Kickstarter and whether or not it’s a good thing, but here’s a cold hard fact: Kickstarter has now funded 10,000 games.
Goddamn. That is a big number.
From a blog post announcing the milestone:
How did this happen? Well, it’s all about people: 2.46 million of them have backed a Games project, pledging a total of $613 million. And 1.45 million of those supporters have backed more than one. Those are the backers we talk about when we talk about our Games community: the ones who return to Kickstarter again and again to discover and support new ideas.
It’s hardly been perfect, and it’s often an outlet for nostalgia-fests over genuinely inventive new ideas, but it’s hard to argue with the facts. $613 million raised for game projects is pretty spectacular and games like Hyper Light Drifter and Night in the Woods might not have been made with Kickstarter. So that’s a positive!
Also among the 10,000: board games, card games… even crossword puzzles. Noted by Kickstarter: the very first gaming project funded by Kickstarter was a project that inter-connected different crossword puzzles and was sent to backers as a PDF. That was back in April 2009.
2009. Eight years ago. Hard to believe Kickstarter has been around that long already.
Edit: This story has been updated to reflect that the 10,000 games funded by Kickstarter included multiple different types of games (including card games and board games) not just video games, as was initially stated in the article.
Comments
9 responses to “Kickstarter Has Now Funded 10,000 Games”
And how many of them delivered on their commitments.
10000 funded, 5000 released, 50 released well. 😛
I think 5000 is probably generous.
Might be higher than you think
I have backed 10 games that were funded, and 9 of them have been delivered. Although that might say more about the games I back than overall kickstarter figures
I’d say you just chose well. Ten out of 10,000 isn’t a great sample size for a failure rate analysis.
Sure, although it’s a better grounded failure analysis than any of the other completely made up numbers produced so far in this thread.
To add to the actual data, I can contribute the following.
84 game projects successfully backed of which 8 I will write off as currently dubious (although only two of those are acknowledged cancelled and several are still posting updates). 55 delivered to date, of which 75% are at least good, while a number are geninely great IMHO including FTL, Grim Dawn, RimWorld, Rebuild: Gangs of Deadsville, Darkest Dungeon, Divinity: Original Sin , Night in the Woods, Shadowrun: Hong Kong, and Pillars of Eternity.
In fact, My hit rate with Kickstarter has been a damn site better than my hit rate from random Steam purchases. In the meantime I’ve helped pay the wages of dozens of people who would otherwise have left the industry, many of whom are going to go on to producing even better games with the skills they learned developing these ones.
All round, I consider the whole experience a huge win.
And 7,500 blew through their Kickstarter funds before release.
…and one game has received almost a quarter of the pledged total.
My blue in the teeth what?