

What Is Kickstarter For? Video Games - vonnik
http://blog.airbriteinc.com/post/66886152025/what-is-kickstarter-for-video-games
Kickstarter is most effective at financing video and tabletop games, which have raised $189 million of the total $861 spent on the platform. More than $2 out of every $10 spent is on interactive entertainment. Backers are people who play.
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egypturnash
You're welcome to say that based on the money, Mr or Mrs Airbrite, but I'll
continue to use it to publish my comic books. And so will a lot of other
people - I've seen statistics that the 'comics' category of Kickstarter is now
having more money flow through it than the #2 publisher of comics in the US.

YMMV.

I also suspect that the people who make and maintain Kickstarter would
disagree with this, given how they've taken steps to largely _remove_ hardware
projects from the site. They deliberately left a lot of money on the table by
doing this.

~~~
vonnik
Mr. Airbrite here. We are saying it based on the money and on total backers,
where the 100K video game projects also come in first.

We don't want to discourage you from publishing your comic books. We like
graphic novels, and we're going to analyze the category later to see what
pledge levels work best.

Looking at our data, I see the average 100K comic book project gets about 3900
backers, and from them, about $62 per head.

~~~
egypturnash
100k comic book project? Man I'd be happy with a 10k comic book project.
Although personally I designed my latest campaign to _avoid_ digging into the
pockets of a few whales - I built it around "moving more books". Promising a
ton of extra junk you have to fulfill, and promising more of them to push
stretch goals, is a huge trap IMHO.

YMMV, obviously. I think there's a lot more to consider about Kickstarter than
"how much money can I raise".

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potatolicious
It might be more interesting to look at number of funded projects rather than
dollar value. Video games dominate because they are so ludicrously expensive
to produce - whereas if you look at a typical art Kickstarter the asking sum
is a relatively low number (you can get a lot of art done for <$10K).

Side note: I'm not sure if I really want to support another video gaming
Kickstarter. With the exception of Planetary Annihilation everything I've
backed has turned out far below expectations. Lots of projects shipping after
endless delays and not even hitting the original bullet point promises after
basically running out of money.

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Apocryphon
Perhaps there's something to be said about the industries getting crowd
funded. The video games industry is notorious for being dominated by AAA
publishers spending Hollywood-level budgets on mass market blockbusters (that
often don't recoup costs) and turning away a lot of traditionalist, purist, or
hardcore gamers. Kickstarter has been an excellent platform for indie gamers
trying to revive older genres, or perhaps engage in experimental forms of
video games.

~~~
wavefunction
I'm a backer of Chris Robert's Star Citizen. The big appeal for crowdfunding
for both Chris and all of us supporting him and the team at CIG is that he
gets to make the game he wants, we trust Chris to make a great game, and
anything that cuts the Bobby Koticks out of the loop is GREAT!

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sedev
Hey Airbrite folks, it's a _blog post,_ it shouldn't be a blank page with
NoScript in effect. That is a failure on your part.

Regarding the substance of the article: I'd argue that you're introducing a
bias towards the outlier projects and ignoring projects (like Egypt Urnash's
upthread) that don't _need_ huge budgets. Tabletop gaming and comics have both
set up thriving Kickstarter communities. Videogames make a big splash on
Kickstarter because their fixed costs are so high (which is its own separate
problem - they need to invest heavily in art assets which, as patio11 put it,
depreciate straight off a cliff).

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DorianeMouret
You might want to take into account backers' context. I believe projects
related to video games attract wealthier backers who are ready to put more
money. As you say it yourself, Veronica Mars raised less money than OUYA but
had more backers. Therefore the backers' social and financial context could be
another potential explanation of why games raise so much money on Kickstarter.
An analysis of who the backers are in each category would make this blog post
more relevant.

~~~
vonnik
That's an interesting point. We don't have demographic data on the backers,
and if KS knows, they haven't released it. Two things to think about.
"Torment: Tides of Numenera" raised $4.2 million. If you look at their pledge
levels, they got nine backers to pledge $10,000 or more. Yes, those people
have a lot of money, but if we assume they pledged 10K and no more for their
rewards, then they account for just one quarter of one percent of Torment's
funds. The real pillars of the campaign were pledges in the $20-$28 range.
Almost 38,000 backers signed on at that level, and their pledges totaled more
than $900,000. Our conclusion is that video games are actually more dependent
on the mass market than on high-end backers. We'll get a post on this out
soon.

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cwal37
It felt like the article was just starting and then it ended; makes me less
likely to follow future content. Although I seem to prefer longer-form writing
than a lot of the internet, so maybe others will be satisfied.

~~~
vonnik
It's a series. We're still crunching the numbers. Most people don't read past
the first page online, anyway, so there's usually no point publishing long
form. You being the obvious exception.

~~~
minimaxir
I'm surprised there aren't any graphs, though. (of the actual data)

~~~
cwal37
Yes! Some graphs would have made this feel much better. I can't believe it
didn't occur to me, but I totally see that gap now.

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kozikow
I recently played Shadowrun Returns which was funded via the Kickstarter.
Although graphics were bad, on many levels it was the best game I played in a
last few years. Kickstarter for games give me some hope that there will be
some games reaching to niche demographics, like old school players. Majority
of new games are targeted for 15 year olds with 15 seconds attention span
looking for flashy graphics :(.

~~~
jasonlotito
> Although graphics were bad

wha? Bad? That's harsh. Maybe they aren't flashy graphics, but I wouldn't say
they are remotely bad.

~~~
y4mi
they look like a game from around 2000

~~~
jasonlotito
Rose colored glasses? Yeah, it's not hyper-realistic, but saying the graphics
are bad is harsh.

[http://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/articles/shadowrun%20return...](http://cdn.pastemagazine.com/www/articles/shadowrun%20returns%201.jpg)

[http://rpgsquare.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/final-
fantasy-i...](http://rpgsquare.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/final-fantasy-ix-
festival-of-the-hunt.png)

That is the best I could come up with without taking 10 years of searching.

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austinl
This seems to be a more and more prevalent model for funding non-AAA games. A
good proportion of the games on the front page of Steam right now are "Early
Access", which work in a similar manner - funding upfront, continual
development.

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gte910h
Kickstarter has several non-electronic consumer products I've seen make it
through, as well as table top RPGs and board games.

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jasonlotito
Of the 840 projects over 100k they looked at, 718 were not for games. So, most
projects are not for games.

~~~
vonnik
That's true. But we didn't say the majority of projects were for games. We're
just saying games do better than other projects on KS. 57% of all KS projects
fail. So the number of projects in any given category is an indication of
project supply but not backer demand. In a sense, it's irrelevant. We assume
people are interested in what succeeds on KS, so we're only talking about the
top projects. And those are the projects that attract the most money and the
most backers.

~~~
jasonlotito
> We're just saying games do better than other projects on KS.

Monetarily, sure. I'd be interested in knowing if games are successfully
funded more overall, regardless of the actual funding amount, or if it's just
that the money games get is larger.

> We assume people are interested in what succeeds on KS, so we're only
> talking about the top projects.

Well, people are interested in what succeeds, but that's different from what
succeeds and what's popular. Most projects that succeed on KS fall short of
your 100k minimum. How do games fair there. Is their a correlation between
what a game asks for and whether it's success.

For example, it would be interesting to know if 95% of games fail if they ask
for less than 50k, but over 100k, only 50% fail. And of course, their is the
question of whose involved with these projects.

Anyways, I didn't mean to imply you are wrong, only that your perspective is
just one perspective, and possibly self-selecting.

