Yesterday, we ran a news article about a drop in Kickstarter funding for video games. In 2014, approximately 27 million dollars is expected to be donated to Kickstarter video game projects, which isn’t anything to scoff at. Currently, about 13.5 million dollars has been donated. However, in 2013, nearly 58 million dollars was donated to Kickstarter projects, with huge name projects like Broken Age and Wasteland 2 . So what changed? What made Kickstarter funding drop by nearly half?
Well, there are a few things that could be behind this. First of all, Kickstarter was a relatively new phenomenon in 2013. They very idea that you could use a crowdfunding source to fund a new video game project was very novel. Kickstarter was originally developed for art projects, and so a lot of the “rewards” that people were getting were things like tickets to a performance or t-shirts. Video games were some of the first examples of Kickstarter projects that essentially offer their entire whole end product as a reward tier.
We were just coming off the end of some of the most successful Kickstarters in history. These were things like The Oculus Rift, the Ouya, Broken Age , and more. Kickstarter was in the public splotlight as a thing that makes dreams come true. So developers started flocking to it. Anything that was too indie for a AAA studio to look at was put there. That’s how Shovel Knight and the new Shantae game was created. It was like all the great ideas from the past were coming home and blossoming via crowdfunding.
However, this also means that more and more projects were slowly put on Kickstarter. Instead of the random one off projects here or there that have serious promise, everyone wanted a piece of the crowdfunding pie. We saw barely complete Christian education games put on Kickstarter. We saw flash games put on Kickstarter. Heck, we saw games that never even came to fruition, which made people start to wonder whether or not investing in a Kickstarter product was a good idea in the first place.
Not only that, but several other crowdfunding sites started to take off. Indiegogo, Patreon, Subbable, and more all started to come up on Kickstarter’s heels. These services offered things that Kickstarter didn’t, like partial funding, or the ability to do extended work in exchange for extended funding. These too slowly became flooded with bad idea after bad idea. Heck, Shaq-Fu came back in indiegogo form, and certain projects that failed on Kickstarter took to other crowdfunding sites in order to fund themselves again and again, and again.
At this point, crowdfunding isn’t new anymore. It’s become a part of life. People aren’t actively searching for projects to fund or back anymore. The community has slowed down and even Kickstarter pages are slightly less active than they were before. Now that Kickstarter isn’t new, it’s just a thing that people are trying to maximize profit on. The first wave of designers looking to make a dream come true are still there, but now everyone wants to hop on board with them. This jades the donating populace to the process and slowly the donations start to wane.
And that is really why I think Kickstarter donations are slowing down. Kickstarter donations only flow if Kickstarter projects are unique, interesting, and always completed. But after delays and cancelations and weird things like Oculus being bought by Facebook, people just aren’t as hype for Kickstarter as they were. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, as bubbles like this burst all the time, and maybe then Kickstarter will become more consistent if anything else.
What do you think? Why do you think Kickstarter funding is dropping?