Kickstarter has been a very popular crowd-funding platform for creators, with 2020 being the most successful year raising $730,030,437 across all categories with video games raising $23,323,927 of the total.
Ico Partners did a deep dive into Kickstarter, compiling numbers and generating a multitude of graphs for all categories and year over year numbers.
Video games did the best in 2013 raising over $47 million with 2015 second best at over $41 million. Since then Kickstarter has not raised nearly as much but 2020 has been the highest since 2016 at $23,323,927.
A lot of the money raised was by 6 games that had campaigns makeover 500 thousand dollars each, but a majority of games landed in the less than 10 thousand dollars raised with 177 games.
2020 saw the third most backed game Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes which raised approximately 4.5 million dollars. One major developer, Platinum Games, had kickstarted the title Wonderful 101: Remastered in February 2020 and raised over 2 million dollars.
The crowdfunding platform has faced many controversies as developers have failed to deliver games as specified in their campaigns, luckily fewer have just never come out. People have to remember Kickstarter is not a storefront but an investment system that has given birth to major projects and some very popular games. Video games on Kickstarter may be seeing lower numbers in the last 4 years but that does not mean great projects are born from the platform with many more to come.
