Kickstarter's Indie Game Funding Dropped In 2014

ICO Partners has compiled some interesting information about the relatively recent crowdfunding of indie video games, taking a look at data from 2013 and comparing it to data from the first half of this year. If the rest of 2014 follows in the footsteps of the first six months, this year will have had considerably less funding for video games than last year.

Last year is said to have been the best year for the crowd funding of video games, seeing 446 funded video game projects. To see how this year is holding up compared to last year, the researchers took the numbers for the first half of this year and doubled it.

Though that doubling won't give us a perfect picture for how the year will end, the assumption is that the latter half of the year will more or less reflect the first half, which had 175 video game projects funded.

Doubling this, we get 350 or so estimated funded games for 2014, a somewhat significant decrease over last year. When looking at the amount of money pledged for crowd-funded video games, however, a big gap opens up between the two.

In 2013, nearly $58m in pledges were made for video game projects. In the first half of 2014, only $13.5m or so had been pledged, making for an estimated $27m for this entire year, more or less.

That's a rather significant decrease, which ICO Partners attributes to two things: enthusiasm for crowdfunding games began to wear thin last year, leading into a slump this year; and, secondly, that 2013 had several very big successes in the category, which caused a very large funding gap between the years despite relatively low differences between project numbers. Competition was cited as another possible reason, as well.

VIA: Kotaku