Kickstarter & Video Games in 2025

After a few years of hiatus, I am bringing back the review of the numbers for video games on Kickstarter. Last year, I did a talk at GDC that included the 2024 numbers. You can watch it for free on the GDC Vault (no account required): https://gdcvault.com/play/1035037/Video-Games-and-Crowdfunding-Best

2025 in numbers

2024 was the best year since 2015 when it comes to the amount raised by successful campaigns in the video game category with USD 26m raised, across a 463 projects.

2025 was close, but shy a few hundred thousands USD to the 2024 score (the numbers on the chart are rounded for readability), with 443 successful video games projects.

The number of funded projects is eerily close year-on-year, the lowest (since 2013) was 365 projects in 2018. Even if 2024 was the largest number of funded project for the category, 2025 is now the second highest number of funded projects on the platform.

When looking at the size of the campaigns, 2025 saw a large of USD 500k+ campaigns with 11 projects raising about that threshold. That the highest number of projects in that band since 2015, more than twice the number of similar projects in 2024.

And a total of 55 projects raised USD 100k+ last year, close to the 62 projects in 2024, and the third highest number of project in that range on the platform. Kickstarter is being very stable when it comes to the video games category over the years.

2025 Kickstarter top video game campaigns

Here is the list of projects that raised USD 500k+ in 2025 (we actually worked with three of those projects):

• Elestrals Awakened (USD 1,4m)
• Autonomica (USD 1m)
• Animation VERSUS (USD 1m)
• Starfinder: Afterlight 💫 (USD 937k)
• Ahoy (USD 860k)
• STARS REACH🌌 (USD 817k)
• POSTAL 2 Redux Founder’s Edition (USD 645k)
• The Sinking City 2 (USD 607k)
• DungeonBox — A D&D Party Game (USD 594k)
• Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori (USD 560k)
• Diesel Knights (USD 526k)

The style of games is quite varied both in terms of genres (sandbox MMO; mech-FPS; cRPG) and settings (scifi; steampunk; lovecraftian).

Kickstarter has been improving its pre-campaign tools in the past year, and the practice of a launching a Coming Soon page is more and more common. Looking at those projects’ number of followers before their launch, it is apparent that most of them have been promoting their campaign ahead of their launch, and had significant number of followers when their campaign started:

The most notable exception is Ahoy! that launched with a mere 351 followers. The campaign however was launched with the support of a dedicated online community for that very unique niche.

Conclusion

2025 was again a stable year for Kickstarter, with the best practices more commonly understood, leading to a few strong performing campaigns. This is a far cry from a common practice in the video game sector, and I see a lot of potential for growth for crowdfunding and video games.

If you are a studio considering crowdfunding, I would recommend checking out my 2025 GDC talk, but also the one I did in 2019 as the two talks were designed to complement each other.

We also run a weekly newsletter that summarize the video game Kickstarter campaigns that launched the previous week, a great way to get a sense of the ecosystem.

And you can reach out to us at ICO Partners, or check out our friends at TCA The Crowfunding Agency.

Kickstarter & Video Games in 2025 was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Crowdfunding For Video Games — Essentials

While not as prominently featured as in the past, crowdfunding campaigns for video games have seen a regular and steady presence on Kickstarter, with an average of 400 campaigns funded every year. The current funding climate has also renewed interest in the idea of raising funds from the players. This post is designed as a guide for studios considering a Kickstarter campaign.

Crowdfunding Fundamentals

Crowdfunding is a unique exercise. Asking your audience to financially support your endeavour, months, sometimes years)before the game is commercially viable is not an easy task, and certain projects are more suited to this than others. This short guide covers a number of key notions for launching a video game crowdfunding campaign. Before detailing projects that work best, there are three types of projects that often struggle to raise money through crowdfunding:

• Mobile games — There are multiple reasons why games on mobile are not well suited for crowdfunding. What the public is willing to spend on those types of games is key. When the average amount spent is lower than the cost of a PC game, it dictates you’ll need many more backers to support you. The Kickstarter community doesn’t show a particular interest in games released on mobile.
• Free-to-play games — In essence, F2P is the opposite of crowdfunding. F2P is the promise to try the game for free first, and then eventually spend money on it. Crowdfunding is the opposite: you give money before you can actually play the title.
• Games for children — A challenging category when it comes to marketing. Games for children struggle to raise money as it’s often difficult to gauge the delivery window of the game, and whether the intended audience’s tastes will have changed by then.

In contrast to this, certain games have qualities that make them particularly well suited for a crowdfunding campaign. Often it can be boiled down to projects where the potential backers have an emotional connection with the game, whether that’s because of its theme, its genre, or its art style.

Here are a few examples of the type of project that tend to do particularly well with crowdfunding:

• Brands with a strong emotional connection — Having an existing brand is key to many successful campaigns. At one point it was reduced to nostalgia, but I believe the appeal is significantly wider. One aspect that is essential here is not only having that brand, but to also have access to the audience of that brand. An interesting aspect here are projects that are brand-adjacent. Many successful campaigns have branded themselves as a spiritual successor to a beloved franchise.

Broken Sword Reforged

Ratatan, a Patapon spiritual successor

• Project from renowned creators — This is an offshoot of the brand idea, where the creator has their own personal brand to leverage. As John Romero discovered in 2015, a name alone is not enough; you need to present a comprehensive project.

The Good Life

• Unique Premise — A game offering a unique experience is well suited to crowdfunding. The unusual aspect on its own contributes to the message that it cannot exist (or fulfil its full potential) without community support.

Boyfriend Dungeon

SUPER HOT

You don’t necessarily have to tick these boxes, but it certainly helps. For a wider look at the video games that find success through crowdfunding, we can highlight some frequent points:

• Games in an untapped niche/underserved genre — If a game exists in a space where lots of those games release and satisfy the niche every year, it will be harder to convince that fanbase to crowdfund your project.
• Games with a strong art style — In a similar vein, games with a distinctive visual style stand out and often succeed on crowdfunding platforms. Games with a realistic style can struggle as they don’t leave a unique impression on potential backers.
• Games that cannot go to Early Access — It is not unusual when discussing with project owners that are exploring crowdfunding to have Early Access considered as an alternative. While the two aren’t mutually exclusive (more on this later), some games by their very nature are not a good fit for Early Access. The best example of this are narrative games. They don’t tend to be as re-playable as other genres, and their story can be spoiled, making Early Access a poor path to choose.
• Games with a wholesome cosy vibe — These do well on Kickstarter, with a community of well meaning backers supporting this trend. Simply put, cosy creators, fans and gamers like to help other cosy creators, fans and gamers.. The cooperation between projects that cross promote each other, does seem to feed that trend.

If your game seems to tick one or more of the boxes mentioned? Great, the work can now begin.

Pre-campaign

A crowdfunding campaign starts months before you push the ‘live’ button. While launching a campaign on a platform such as Kickstarter offers some extra visibility, the vast majority of your project backers will come from your own efforts, and that effort needs to start as soon as possible.

First, you need to build your audience. You can view detailed blog posts about this by Chris Z. What matters most in the case of a crowdfunding campaign is where you direct your audience as you build it.

A Tale of Two Masters

Sending your audience to your pre-campaign page on the platform you are using (also called Coming Soon page or Upcoming Project page) will provide the best results for your campaign and great insights on how well your campaign will perform once live.

When it comes to video games projects in particular, this is slightly more challenging. To maximise the commercial success of your game, many will tell you that you need to send your audience to your Steam page in order to accrue as many wish lists as possible. Feeding enthusiastic players to the Steam wish list algorithm is the cornerstone of most marketing strategies. With Kickstarter also requiring keen fans to be directed to your pre-campaign page, which should you prioritise when communicating about your game?

We usually recommend neither. Send your audience to your own website and landing page, and there, deliver a Call to Action to register on your newsletter.

Your landing page can also provide links to your Steam page and your crowdfunding pre-campaign page, but collecting your fans’ emails provide many more opportunities, and you still can promote both your Steam page and your crowdfunding campaign to them.

Once you have a page ready and you’re acquiring Followers on your pre-campaign page, consider the following:

• Campaigns that reach 20% or more of their funding goal in the first 48 hours are the most likely to be funded.
• On average, 10 to 12% of the followers of a campaign back it in the first 48 hours. The initial momentum is absolutely key, and your followers will help you here.
• By the end of a campaign, about 20% of the followers have backed the campaign. Followers that don’t convert on the first day still matter and will help you by the end.
• This data point is subject to a lot more variance, but we have frequently observed that video game campaigns often reach a number of backers equal or superior to the number of followers they had at the launch of their campaign.

As you arrive closer to your campaign launch date, these data points can become incredibly useful to help you gauge the potential you have at hand, allowing you to possibly adjust the scope of the project.

Things to know about Followers on Kickstarter:

• A follower of a campaign receives 4 notifications:

1. At the launch of the campaign
2. A reminder of the last 48 hours of the campaign
3. A reminder of the last 8 hours of the campaign
4. The campaign has ended but has Late Pledges enabled (a good reason to activate this option when you are putting your campaign together)

• You will NOT get the email addresses of your followers, but only the emails of your backers.

Building Your Campaign

We have been using the following template for video game campaigns, adapting it to the specifics of each project:

• Key features, USP overview + animated GIFs
• Links to store page / Discord / Social Networks
• (if you have a demo) Link to play the Demo
• Detailed key features / gameplay + animated GIFs
• (only once the funding goal has been reached) Stretch Goals
• (optional) Community Goals
• Rewards table, description and content
• Platforms on which the game will be available
• Languages
• Team presentation
• Timeline of the project
• Why Kickstarter?
• Risks
• (optional) Environmental commitments
• (optional) Project Budget

These broad categories, generally in this order, should help you draft your own page. Please note, it is very important to present the game well, and the first four sections are the most valuable. Include high quality gifs as often as possible to illustrate your game descriptions.

We highly recommend running a campaign when a demo of the game is available. If this is not feasible, it’s important to provide plenty of gifs and videos instead. If you can, include in your demo a Call to Action to check out your crowdfunding campaign.

Reward Considerations

Each project needs to lean on its strengths when determining backer rewards, but we can provide several principles worth following:

• Your main reward will likely be offering a copy of the game to your backers, at full price. A good way to avoid that tier to be compared to the game being available at launch is to add exclusive perks that will be valued by your most engaged fans. Typical perks include adding the name of backers to your credits, and offering a unique role to be displayed on your Discord (should you have one).
• It is common to see video game campaigns offer a reward tier that adds the game’s original soundtrack, and a digital artbook with concept art for the game.
• Crowdfunding platforms commonly support a system where you can either limit the number of backers that can choose a specific reward, or limit that reward for a period of time. Time-limited rewards are excellent for either your entry-level or next incremental reward, in order to drive momentum at the beginning of your campaign.
• Providing a form of early access to the game is often valued as part of a crowdfunding campaign rewards. Just be mindful to make sure this will only be offered to your Kickstarter backers and that other forms of early access, whether Steam Early Access or a Beta Test program, are separate. Your backers might not appreciate being charged extra for something that other people can freely receive.
• I usually strongly encourage studios to consider digital perks for their rewards as there are many ways to be creative here. Here are a few examples of creative rewards:

Thimbleweed Park offered backers that pledged $50 or more to have their name in the game’s phonebook.

Armello offered their backers a set of dice with a colour unique to Kickstarter backers. The multiplayer aspect of the game makes this reward particularly valuable as a way to show your early support to the game. On the other hand, the Bandit Clan exclusive DLC proved to be a challenge and the studio had to remove the exclusivity of this reward.

• You can consider physical rewards, but do not commit to these unless you have properly sourced the production for the items and have found fulfilment partners to handle the shipping to your backers.
• Campaigns sometimes offer as limited rewards the ability for backers to submit content, or their likeness, to be added to the game. If you do, make sure you understand the production costs, pricing those rewards tiers correctly, while being clear with disclaimers about the process and your ability to refuse the content submitted if not appropriate for your project.

Campaign Timing

Crowdfunding isn’t bound by seasonality, but you should still consider the following:

• Avoid the Christmas period (20th of December to 3rd of Jan).
• For video games specifically, you may wish to avoid launching your campaign during the June showcase period (the Not-E3 period).
• If you can, launch at the beginning of the week. Avoid Friday, Saturday, Sunday to launch your campaign.
• If you can, set the end of the campaign to the end of the work week. Avoid Saturday, Sunday and Monday to end your campaign.
• 30 days is the ideal length. If you can start and finish around the beginning of a month, you will make it easier for backers waiting for their monthly pay to make a decision to support your campaign.

Kickstarter has also recently added the option for campaigns to stay open for “Late Pledges” once a campaign is finished.

Parting Words

There is much more that can be said, but this post should place you in a strong position when it comes to crowdfunding your game. There a lots of valuable resources available should you wish to explore the topic more deeply:

• The blog from The Crowdfunding Agency. https://medium.com/the-crowdfunding-agency
• The Post Mortem for the campaign of Mika and the Witch’s Mountain (that raised EUR 1.3m) https://chibig.com/mika-post-mortem-part-i/
• My GDC talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ks1XGS2JS6s&list=PLQBJSjIsYX6LeMdpDA3YSHhFkJzRjbgl3&index=1

You can reach me on Blue Sky or via Linkedin.

Crowdfunding For Video Games — Essentials was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the usual review of the performance of games on Kickstarter for the past year. This post contains number shared originally at my Pocket Gamer Connect London talk on the topic, including the latest bets practices of successful campaigns.

Tabletop Games in 2021

2021 was yet again a year net growth for tabletop games on Kickstarter, both in raw numbers of projects funded, but also in the total amount of money raised by the projects.

If the year-on-year growth for the amount of money raised is less than in 2020 (+33% in 2020 and +13% in 2021), the year-on-year growth in the total number of projects getting funded is closer (+17% in 2020 and +11% in 2021) and still pretty impressive for an industry very much qualified as niche.

Many professionals I have talked took are very afraid of a bubble, and the platform becoming less reliable to finance their projects, but 2021 is not showing this sort of signs.

With a number of large projects having launched on Kickstarter competing platform Gamefound, tabletop games and crowdfunding are on track to keep their very heathy relationship.

Looking at the size of the projects overall, the amount of money raised by each projects tiers, is sensibly the same as in 2020 — and the same is true for total number of funded projects in each tier who grew in the same proportion.

This shows a very steady growth from one year to another — and this is also the first year that Kickstarter saw the total number of tabletop projects raising more than $500,000 in a year pass the 100 mark (101 projects exactly), an impressive number!

Video Games & Kickstarter

The video games category keeps seeing very stable numbers, with a slightly lower amount of money raised in total.

However, it has broken a record number of funded projects with 441 video games meeting their financial goal in 2021. This is the second year in a row that the video games category breaks its own record for funded projects, and only the third time we see more than 400 projects getting funded in a year.

The most remarkable trend in 2021, is the total number of projects raising between $100k and $500k being the highest ever (51 projects, beating the previous record year, 2014). This is the tier raising the most money in 2021, with fewer projects in the $500k tier than in 2020.

With fewer “hits”, last year’s numbers are showing more than an excellent stability for the video game category, but a slight growth. The trend is not significant enough that we can expect Kickstarter to have the prominence it had in the 2012–2015 period, but with more video projects than ever before meeting their goals, it makes Kickstarter a reliable platform to crowdfund the right video game projects.

Conclusion

Last year was yet another good year for games on Kickstarter. A continued overall growth for tabletop games, despite the emergence of a serious competitor, and a growth in mid size projects for video games.

2022 will be a key year though. Kickstarter’s announcement it is developing a “protocol” on the blockchain has been met by serious pushback from creators and backers alike, with the game ecosystem being very vocal about their discontent. This is happening right as Gamefound is working towards opening their platform beyond the few curated projects it has launched so far.

Regardless of where the projects get funded, the past trend show that games, both on tabletop and on digital platforms, have a strong future with crowdfunding still.

Kickstarter in 2021 for Games was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

State of Kickstarter and games — mid-2021 update

Following up on my round of analysis of Kickstarter and Games in 2020, it is high time to look at how games have done on the platform for the first half of 2021.

Spoiler alert: Tabletop Games keep growing, Video Games stay stable.

Tabletop Games on Kickstarter — first semester of 2021

With the yearly data, we can see the first indication that 2021 is not looking bad at all for tabletop games. The number of funded projects is ahead of the previous year if you project for a similar amount to be funded in the last 6 months, and the number of projects that were not funded is below a similar projection. That means a whopping 75% of projects launched in the first half of 2021 met their funding goal.

Looking at the data per semester, it is obvious that the ongoing trend and growth for tabletop games has not slowed in 2021.

If anything, there is a slight acceleration, with a +11% number of funded projects increase from H2 2020, which had a +10% increase from the previous semester.

Looking at the amount of money raised yearly, we can see the trend observed with the number of funded projects holds true here too.

Tabletop games projects raised more in the first half of 2021 than during the entirety of 2017. There is a good chance that by the end of the year, we can say that the amount of money raised in Kickstarter by tabletop projects has doubled in four years, especially when a hit success like the Avatar tabletop RPG is NOT appearing in the numbers shared above.

In the first half of 2021, there has been 52 tabletop projects that raised more than $500,000, and 28 of these raised more than $1m.

Looking at these million dollars projects, we noticed three interesting profiles behind the growth of the category:

• Board game projects based on a video game franchise: The Witcher; Monster Hunter; Stellaris. Projects that were in the top 8 most funded tabletop games for the first semester of 2021.
• Tabletop Roleplaying Games: The One Ring; Twisted Taverns; Auroboros; Grim Hollow; Coyote & Crow. The total number of tabletop RPG raising more than $1m prior to 2021 was… four. That number has now more than doubled, and the year is far from over, with at least a sixth game joining that shortlist, the aforementioned Avatar Legends. Note that I am not including the very popular campaigns around tabletop RPG accessories such as dice and miniatures, which have seen a lot of success prior to 2021 and have their own dynamic.
• Sequels, expansions, re-printing of successful board games: Everdell; Zombicide; Mythic Battles; Root; Castles of Mad King Ludwig; The Isle of Cats. This is not a particularly new trend, but it is worth noting that the very good numbers for tabletop projects on Kickstarter are thanks to those proven games going back to the platform for the next stage of their lifecycle.

Beyond the $1m+ projects though, all the other funding tiers (except the Under $10k tier)raised less money and saw fewer projects funded. The difference is small, for the tier of projects raising between $100k and $500k for instance, we went from 171 funded projects and $38m in H2–2020, to 169 funded projects and $35m in H1–2021.

Are these larger projects, combined with the new performance of tabletop RPGs, hiding the slowing of the growth of the category on Kickstarter? This is very hard to tell at this stage, especially as none of these numbers account for an important change in the landscape: Gamefound.

Gamefound numbers, or their absence thereof

On the 17th of December 2020, Gamefound launched its first native crowdfunding campaign for ISS Vanguard. The campaign was successful and concluded on the 7th of January 2021, having raised close to $5m.

Gamefound as a platform is still curating the projects that are launching on it, and while the scale of it is far from the one of Kickstarter, there is no doubt that the campaigns that launched so far on Gamefound would have found their way on Kickstarter, probably for a similar success. The relatively good numbers of Kickstarter for the first half of 2021 would have been even better if not for the new competition offered by Gamefound.

The data collection on Kickstarter is not a simple task, and I haven’t gotten around to go through a similar exercice for Gamefound. The picture, for now, is thus quite incomplete. This is not new though. I haven’t provided data for Games projects from other platforms in a years now (last time was when Fig was still somewhat relevant to video games), but it is likely that the size of the projects finding success on Gamefound will mean a better picture of the crowdfunding performance of games in general, and board games in particular, will require to include this platform to the next analysis. Let’s look at this in a few months, will you?

Video Games on Kickstarter — first semester of 2021

Looking at the yearly data, 2021 so far looks slightly behind 2020 in the number of funded projects.

When considering the number of funded projects each semester though, the first half of 2021 is ahead of the first half of 2020. Early 2020 was likely most affected by the covid-19 pandemic, and projects being postponed to the second half of the year.

Looking at the amount of money raised by successful projects in the first half of 2021, the projects of the video games category performed very well. This is second best semester (after H2–2020) since 2015.

The two projects that raised more that $500,000 went on to raise a lot more than that as Friday Night Funkin’ and Coral Island respectively raised $2.2m and $1.6m. Two very different games finding an audience and success.

A slew of games managed to raise between $100,000 and $500,000 too, for a total just short of $5m, across 25 projects.

Overall, 2021 so far is following the same stability we have observed for video games projects on the platform. There is a steady flow of video games creations that find funding on Kickstarter, and there is no sign of decline in sight.

State of Kickstarter and games — mid-2021 update was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to the usual deep dive into the past year for crowdfunding in general, as well as for games specifically.

tl;dr: A record breaking year for Kickstarter in general and tabletop games in particular. Video games are also doing well.

Overall Kickstarter Numbers

When it comes to the money raised , 2020 is now holding the record for the best year for Kickstarter, with a staggering $730m.

That’s $115m more than in 2019, which was the previous record. That bump is the largest since 2014, while the number of funded projects is actually lower than previous years, reinforcing that notion that running a crowdfunding campaign is becoming a well understood exercise, that raises more money on average now than ever.

Purely looking at the number of projects launched last year, it might seem like 2020 was not the best of years for Kickstarter projects. But this is just confirming the trend of the previous year where less projects were launched overall, but more projects were funded. In 2020, we saw a tiny dip in the number of funded projects, but it doesn’t belie the trend as the overall number of project launched dropped much more significantly.

Crowdfunding is confirmed as a specialist exercise, with a larger proportion of projects meeting their goal overall.

Kickstarter Numbers per Category

I have separated all the categories on Kickstarter in three tiers, for more readability:

• Categories that raised more than $50m in a year
• Categories that raised between $10m and $35m in a year
• Categories that raised less then $10m in a year

In the top tier, we find again the three categories that have been the most successful on Kickstarter the past few years: Design, Games, Technology.

All three of them have seen growth this past year, but it is obvious that Games have seen biggest bump.

In the mid tier, we can see a different story:

• Art, Comics, and Publishing have grown quite significantly in 2020
• Food projects also have collectively collected more in 2020 than 2019, but to a lesser extend (+20%)
• Fashion, Film & Video and Music, have all three had a worse year in 2020.

For Film & Video and Music, this particularly striking as these two categories were the ones on which Kickstarter built its initial success. It is the lowest total amount raised for each category since 2010.

For Film & Video, 2020 is also the year with the lowest number of funded projects since 2009, the year of the launch of the platform.

I strongly suspect that an already downward trend was amplified by the need for in person events for both of these categories (concerts; cinema showing).

The bottom tier (by amount raised) shows categories that have all done poorly in 2020 in comparison to 2019.

The Theater category in particular dropped -78%, and the Covid-19 pandemic is probably the main reason for this.

Kickstarter & Tabletop Games

2020 was again a record year for Tabletop Games on Kickstarter. They represent nearly a third of all the money raised on Kickstarter that year.

This is also the biggest increase year-on-year that the category has seen in the past five years, with +33% ( representing +$60m).

The number of funded project has followed a similar growth to the one seen in the amount of money raised.

Interestingly — the number of projects that didn’t get funded has been roughly the same for the past four years. It means the percentage of funded projects has been increasing quite consistently, now sitting at 70% for 2020.

Looking at projects per tiers, we can see there has been more projects in all brackets of funding.

Projects that raised more than $500,000 obviously account for a significant part of the record breaking amount of money raised by the category, but with close to $100m raised thanks to the smaller projects, it shows that Kickstarter is not benefitting just from the big hits.

There were a few noteworthy projects to know about last year:

• Frosthaven. The sequel to the hit game Gloomhaven. It went on to break the record for most successful tabletop game crowdfunding campaign, raising $12,969,608 from 83,193 backers. The previous record holder, Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5, had raised $12,393,139 back in 2016.
• Nemesis Lockdown was the third most successful tabletop campaign of 2020, raising close to $7m. What is very interesting is that since then, its publisher has expanded its pledge managing service, Gamefound, to fully a fully fledged crowdfunding platform for tabletop games. Its first project, ISS Vanguard, raised close to $5m.
• Return to Dark Tower was another very successful take on redesigning a classic board game by Restoration Games.

Kickstarter & Video Games

Video Games have had a much more tumultuous history over the years with video games than their tabletop counterparts. The medium are quite different, and the industries behind them function in fundamentally different ways. This said, it is interesting to see that 2020 has been a good year for that category as well.

2020 has seen the most money raised for video games since 2015 and the most projects funded since 2014.

While it doesn’t mean we are getting back to the level of enthusiasm and success we saw these two years, it solidifies the platform as an opportunity for video games studios considering it for the coming years.

Specifically looking at projects by tiers, 2020 excellent performance appears to be mostly supported by the excellent performance of its six $500,000+ projects, with its two most successful video games this year coming from Japan (Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes and The Wonderful 101: Remastered). Out of these six projects, only one of them is being made in the USA, Kindred Fates. Sea of Stars is being made in Canada, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous is from Owlcat Games in Moscow, and My Time at Sandrock is from Chinese studio Pathea Games.

2020 has had the most projects raising between $10,000 and $50,000 of any year — lifting the median amount raised by video game projects.

Concluding words

2020 was far from being a typical year for all of us… But when it comes to Kickstarter and games, things have looked eerily similar to previous years, following the trends set lately.

The good performance of the video games category, both with more projects funded and more money raised than in quite a while, is also good news, and we might see more growth in that category in 2021!

Kickstarter in 2020 for Games was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A war is fought on multiple battlefield, and consoles wars are no different. Some will matter than others, the main being the number of units that get sold, but today we are looking at another one, that matters to us as we work with media and related projects every day: media presence.

The Xbox Series X was officially released yesterday, and it seems like an excellent opportunity on well it has been doing when it comes to its presence in online articles. And while we are at it, we will also look into the PlayStation 5 performance to date.

Lack of a first move advantage

Looking at the volume of coverage secured online over the past year, the PlayStation 5 has been ahead of it Microsoft’s counterpart most of the time, but it appears it has been true more so in the past three months (with November not over yet obviously), showing a strong advantage to Sony on the media field.

Looking at the share each of these next gen consoles represent of all the articles mentioning their respective brands, it is quite revealing to see that Sony has pushed a lot more the PS5 to media than Microsoft has for the Xbox Series X.

More than half of the articles in Sep/Oct/Nov 2020 that mentioned PlayStation also mentioned the PlayStation 5.

For the Xbox series X, that 50% mark has only been passed in November, the month of release of the console.

That big discrepancy is probably indicative of a very different approach to the marketing of this new generation of consoles, with Microsoft probably taking a longer term approach, and not pushing exclusives as much, and dedicating a larger share of its energy to the current gen (or should I say old gen now?) of the Xbox One, than Sony.

But this is just the first bout, and there are still many skirmishes ahead before we can tell who has handled this generation’s strategy better.

Note on the methodology

To find out more about the media monitoring tool we use, you can read this article about it.

Xbox Series X Release — The battle of the media presence was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This midyear update is going to be quite different from its predecessors as 2020 is proving to be quite a unique year. While sharing new data from the first six months of 2020, I will mostly talk about my understanding of the effects of the corona virus pandemic on Kickstarter projects.

Most of the data shared here cover the past 18 months, with data over the past eight years at the end.

tl; dr: The number of projects launched on the platform has massively dropped.

However, a few hits surprisingly mean that the total amount of money raised recently is on par with the amount raised during the same period last year.

Drop in projects being launched

Kickstarter is subject to seasonality. If you look at how many projects are launched every month, December is always a low month, with holidays getting in the way, many creators don’t want to have to manage a stressful crowdfunding campaign at the same time as the seasonal holidays. There is also the consideration (not necessarily true for crowdfunding campaigns) that asking for money during this period is harder as people are already heavily solicited.

This said, we can now look at the numbers of projects launched over the past 18 months. While January and February are on par with the numbers from the previous year even showing some growth, there is a steep decline in numbers starting in March (-24% y-o-y), an usually strong month, and the year-on-year decline gets steeper in April (-34%) and May (-37%), and clear bounce in June (-10%).

February 2020 was a very good month for Kickstarter projects, with 21% more projects meeting their funding goal than in February 2019. But year-on-year growth stops there, with a slight decline in March 2020 (-9%) and a much steeper drop in April 2020 (-28%), and May 2020 ending with almost a third of the number of funded projects of May 2019. Again, we see some recovery in June 2020 that is only 14% behind June 2019.

Spring being an usually strong period for crowdfunding, it shows how much of an impact the pandemic crisis has had in regards to Kickstarter.

Looking into different categories though, they are not all affected the same way. I will share here the numbers for the seven largest categories on Kickstarter.

First off, almost all the categories are affected with fewer campaigns launched year-on-year in March, April, and May. In June, the Games and Technology categories saw more projects launched year-on-year, with Design and Publishing at about the same level as June 2019.

The technology category is standing out with more projects in April 2020 than in April 2019. It still sees fewer projects launched over the last four months period, but the difference is quite small (-3.5% year-on-year) when considering the effect observed on the other categories.

Onto that, some categories seem much more affected than others, with a bigger drop in the numbers of projects launched, especially in April & May 2020:

• Film & Video (-47% year-on-year in Mar/Apr/May/Jun) — Most projects are live action films, or in-person documentaries, with the lock-downs and social distancing policies, these are very difficult to execute.
• Music (-47% year-on-year in Mar/Apr/May/Jun) — Similarly, music projects often require artists to be physically in the same space — whether to rehearse or record. Not to mention that concerts are, in the best cases, postponed to later dates.
• Fashion (-36% year-on-year in Mar/Apr/May/Jun) — This category is above the platform average and quite affected where the number of project launched are concerned. It is probably very reliant on in-person collaborative work, as well as dependent on supply chains that are affected (even though, tabletop games are too and don’t see such a drop).

Publishing, Design and Games saw a less significant drop that is below the platform average of -25% year-on-year for the four months period from March to June. They are all likely less dependent on in-person work.

Not shown here, a few of the smaller categories, especially Dance and Theater, were greatly affected, with -84% and -86% respective year-on-year on the number of projects launched in May 2020. Note that even during normal times these projects only account for a small number of the ones you can find on the platform (less than 1%). Their reliance on in-person entertainment (and in-person rewards) easily explains these drastic numbers, and illustrates the dire effect of the crisis for their sector beyond crowdfunding.

Money raised keeping up thanks to large projects

As you look at these numbers, you need to bear in mind that most crowdfunding projects run for a period of 30 days. The drop in the number of projects launched in March is seen in the amount of money raised by April’s successful projects.

As it stands, February and March 2020 were good months as far as money raised on Kickstarter is concerned, but this is where it gets even stranger… For the first six months of 2020, Kickstarter campaigns raised more money than the ones in the first six months of 2019…

For the first six months of 2020, Kickstarter campaigns raised more money than the ones in the first six months of 2019…

So, even though we see a drop in the number of launched projects over that period of time, why is the total amount of money raised relatively stable?

It stands to show how much the hits weigh on the platform’s performance when it comes to the total amount of money raised. These are also the campaigns with the best support behind them, and the least likely to be derailed by the corona-virus pandemic, where multi-person teams can cope more easily with the sudden change of paradigm, and where they are more likely to have access to extra resources to throw at problems to compensate for the change in their environments.

It is also likely that the impact cannot be totally absorbed by these hits over time.

On the positive side, at the moment, if a downward trend can be correlated to the fewer projects being launched, there is no indication that the backers are less likely to support the projects they love. The number of individual pledges made on the platform is in line with the amount of money raised.

Americas more affected than other regions

When considering where the drop in projects is more pronounced, the United States are coming up ahead. This might be related again to the smaller projects that are likely suffering the most, and these are more likely American as Kickstarter’s main audience is from North America. For example, small French projects are more likely to look at launching on a local platform such as Ulule, and only the more ambitious French projects seeking to reach an international audience are likely to consider Kickstarter.

Effects on the Tabletop Games subcategory

The decline in projects seen in the overall Games category can be observed for tabletop games as well. The ratio of projects meeting their goal and getting funded is aligned with the average for that segment.

There is a sharp decline in the amount of money raised in April 2020, steeper than the decline in the number of projects that month. However, a single project ending in May, Frosthaven, has alone raised more money than all the tabletop games of the month of April put together.

A few other projects running during the same period also doing very well, and tabletop games have raised more than $33m in May 2020. Technically, this is the best month ever for tabletop games in terms of amount of money raised.

As it stands, while definitely affected by the corona-virus crisis, it seems like that category as a whole is holding itself together pretty well.

Effects on Video Games

The video games subcategory is following a similar pattern, with the first three months in line with the corresponding 2019 period.

The year-on-year comparison for April 2020 and May 2020 shows a decline in the number of projects, but the ratio of projects meeting their goal (respectively 26% and 27% of projects meeting their goals) stays within the norm for that subcategory.

The bounce back in the number of projects for June can also be seen for video games, and with 41 projects meeting their goals, it is the second best month in that regards from the past year and a half.

There is a lot of variance in that subcategory due to the smaller amount of projects launched compared to tabletop games, but the average amount of money raised per project in April 2020 is actually higher than usually seen for video games.

Note that March 2020 was an exceptionally good month as far as money raised is concerned with two projects raising $2m+ each (The Wonderful 101; Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous).

Like tabletop games, video games on Kickstarter are affected negatively by the covid-19 crisis, but not as much as other categories on the platform.

Semester data

I usually share data under a much different format for the midyear updates, not looking at month-by-month numbers. This year is different as looking at the effect of the pandemic required a much closer look. But for the sake of consistency with previous articles, here are charts showing the evolution of Kickstarter by semester.

You can see that the covid pandemic impact is hidden when looking at the numbers that way. But you can still see that the number of overall projects on the platform is at its lowest since 2012.

Very successful projects managed to maintain the level of overall money raised on Kickstarter, making the first semester of 2020 as the second best in the platform history.

Finally, I also wanted to share these two videos that we find are a nice different way to present data:

Conclusion

Crowdfunding campaigns on Kickstarter have been affected by the corona-virus crisis, there is no doubt about it. Fewer projects have been launched across almost all categories, but some are way more affected than others.

On the flip side, the campaigns that do launch can still perform very well, and it seems that there is no strong effect on campaigns that gets funded, or for projects’ ability to become hits.

The nature of crowdfunding, and the time it takes for a campaign to be put together, means that we might not see the full consequences of the crisis on the ecosystem yet, and as we go deeper into the summer, these trends might change, especially if the effects on the global economy get deeper.

Other articles to read

Backerkit on the effect of the covid crisis: https://www.backerkit.com/blog/coronavirus-crowdfunding

Biggercake in depth risk analysis: https://www.biggercake.com/blog/coronavirus-and-kickstarter-in-depth-risk-analysis/

Kickstarter on the topic:

https://www.kickstarter.com/articles/covid-19-coronavirus-kickstarter-impact-pledges-projects-launch

Methodology and key information

We are checking projects on Kickstarter daily, looking for new projects and updating the data collected on live campaigns. We have been collecting data since 2013, as well as checking past projects.

The methodology used doesn’t look exhaustively at projects, but the margin of error and missed projects numbers are small.

Note that on the 20th of March, Kickstarter ran a program offering live campaigns to be extended by a week, to help creators deal with the covid crisis, and relieve them from the pressure of their campaigns. We estimate about 4,500 campaigns were live at the time. This likely has an impact on the data shared here, as more projects could move their end date from one month (March) to another (April or even May).

Last but not least, when looking at crowdfunding campaigns data in the past, I have always looked at the date when the campaigns end to determine the campaign “date” rather than its launch date. In the analysis above, looking at a glance, you might wonder why there is a discrepancy in the numbers, and this is likely the cause of it.

State of Kickstarter — 2020 mid-year update was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hi!

As a relatively new starter to the ICO team (I joined around nine months ago) I’m very excited to be the one pulling the curtain on a few big changes we’re doing at the agency that we wanted to share with you all who know and follow us. Today we’re super thrilled to be announcing a full rebranding, doubling our focus down on helping studios worldwide self-publish their games and our new vision for the future of ICO and what we do.

But first, a bit of context. ICO Partners has been running for twelve years now, first established by Thomas and Diane as a videogames consulting agency helping asian and american companies set up shop in Europe. Fast forward to today, we’ve grown to a fully fledged videogames agency, with hundreds of clients on our portfolio, having helped launch world-renowned brands like Riot’s League Of Legends, Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering Arena or Hi-Rez Studios’ SMITE.

We are also lucky to have helped lots of small and medium sized companies, indie studios and publishers get their games seen and talked about. We have met many friends, found our expertise and participated in many industry-wide initiatives, events and talks. To everyone who’s been a partner in all these years, we say a big thank you!

But after twelve years it was time to stop, look at our past and our future and reimagine our processes, approach and company mission, vision and values. The aim was to clearly define what we do, who we are and what we care most about. To this end, last year we took some time to reflect on and crystalize a new vision for ICO.

The outcome of those discussions are a series of progressive changes that we’ve already started putting in place, and today is the time to share them publicly:

• A new ICO.
  We are moving from ICO Partners to just ICO, and giving our identity a completely fresh look. This comes with two new websites (one about us, another one about our current clients), a new Medium blog and revamped social media presence, which have been long overdue.
• A new mission: To unlock our clients self-publishing potential.
  Big game studio making a AAA game-as-service or two-team independent developer, our mission is to help teams of all sizes get their games out, seen and enjoyed by players worldwide.
• Three areas of focus
  Moving forward we are focusing on three areas of work to support our partners: Communications (PR, Social Media, Influencer Marketing), Business Intelligence and Marketing, all of them at a European level. Broadly speaking this doesn’t change much but at a company level it helps us define very clearly what we do and communicate it better.

• Broadening the scope on each area
  On Communications, we’ve added Influencer Marketing and Social Media to our suite of services. On Business Intelligence, we are widening our crowdfunding and our historical online game consulting missions and working to support the strategic needs of our partners. On Marketing, we’re looking to ramp up efforts on creative services, localization, sourcing, production, networking, event support and more.
• Launching a new weekly newsletter.
  As part of our new activities we are launching a new weekly newsletter for journalists and games industry professionals. This one will collect all the new games released on the Nintendo Switch store in the previous 7 days and deliver it every week to your email in an easy to digest format. This one is built on the back of our Steam newsletter, which has been running for a while.

• We’ve been growing!
  We are now a team of eleven, but we are still working from a central office in Brighton here in the UK. We’ve also taken on board several new partners we’re very happy to work with!

• Now on Medium
  We are moving our blog to Medium, all the previous content is still available at icopartners.com/blog, but moving forward we’ll be calling this space our home.
• Delivering on our mission by leveraging our expertise and tools.
  Expertise can be a bit of a loaded word, but we have a top team with many many years of individual experience in the games industry and we’re proud about it. We strive to share this expertise with our friends and partners and help them get where they want to be.

These past few months have been busy, and we have had to adjust to the current circumstances, with the full team now working remotely. Luckily for us the games industry is very well positioned to help people during these strange times and we’re very proud to be assisting our partners to deliver entertainment and fun to people worldwide.

Wrapping things up, we’re very much open for business so if you have a game and need help or want to get help with industry data, please reach out. On the other hand, if you are a journalist or content creator please register with us so we can get you our communications and opportunities regularly.

Also, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletters if you want to check out the latest games on Steam and Nintendo Switch.

Thanks for reading!

Introducing the new ICO! was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The recent release of the UKIEpedia initiative in the UK made me realise that I haven’t shared data specific to the country in quite some time. This a very good opportunity to do so, using the same dataset that we collected for the yearly state of the game for Kickstarter.

Money pledged and money raised

With close to $3m raised by successful campaigns in 2019, last year was a strong year for Kickstarter in the UK.

Video games projects

Like on the overall number seen in the 2019 blog post, the number of projects launched on Kickstarter for video games are in constant decline while the number of projects that managed to get funded is relatively stable.

This leads to the ratio of UK campaigns getting funded to rise to 26% in 2019.

Campaigns profile

When looking at the UK campaigns by tiers, it becomes very apparent that most of the money raised in 2019 was through the very successful Subverse campaign, with no other campaign raising more than $100,000 last year. And while it skews the results, the low volume of UK projects means that it was also true in the previous years where a single project was more than half of the money raised.

Kickstarter and Video Games in the UK was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It has been a while since my last Many Mistakes medium post. I guess until today, no project stroke this particular part of my brain that requires to write down what I think is wrong in a specific crowdfunding campaign.

But today, today, I will talk to you about… Nighthawks.

If you want, head to the campaign page now, before reading further: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/753131002/nighthawks-the-vampire-rpg-0

Or, you can peruse my comments and then go make up your own mind there. it doesn’t matter much.

I would like to insist on the fact this is purely a look at the campaign itself, I won’t be taking into consideration the game qualities themselves.

Mistake #1 — The Page lay-out

While it true that most visitors to page will already be familiar to your project in some ways, I think it is absolutely key to think your layout in a way that will make it appealing to someone who will discover the project for the very first time. This is what the top of the campaign page looks like:

Text. Text. More text.

BE VISUAL.

The whole page is hard to read — I don’t mind the long-ish paragraph here and there, but there is nothing that jumps and tell me what kind of game it is and what to expect.

There are no gifs.

MAKE GIFS. Even for your low action, text-driven game. Show part of the games with interaction. It will convey what your game is about much more quickly than. A wall of text.

Ideally, you would make diagrams, or infographics to illustrate the key elements of your game too. Ones that can also be easily recycled on social media.

And talking of social media, an image to link to your twitter account would lead to more results than a link lost in a sea of text.

Mistake #2 — Show the gameplay first

This is true for both the video and the campaign page: it takes too long to show the game.

In the video, the live action introduction is very nice. It would do a nice launch trailer. But it will lose anyone not already invested in the game.

Ditto on the game page.

This is a paragraph that is before the in-depth description of the game:

It is not that this is superfluous… but this should come after the game has been described. This is too much fluff where I am still reading through trying to see what is cool and unique about this campaign.

I mean. You get to run your own nightclub? There is a strong life-management component? That needs to be presented much earlier on the page. it needs to be made sexy.

Back to the video. The gameplay video is quite… boring. It goes with the territory, there is a lot of text in the game, you need to give time to the viewer to read, not all options are with voice over. It screams to have a commentary-style gameplay video, with an explanation of what you are doing, your options, and what will be in the game in terms of mechanisms later on.

Mistake #3 —Rewards informations

It is quite customary to present the rewards in the main campaign page. the way Kickstarter present the different pledge level is not necessarily very easy to navigate. Making a simple table, summarizing all the rewards makes it easier for the backer to make a decision on what level to back.

This is especially frustrating as I like the rewards that were designed in that campaign.

Mistake #4 —Don’t be generous just for the sake of it

I like the rewards. I think you should be generous with your backers. I think Nighthawks is too generous though.

For instance, I am 100% in favour of having a $1 tier. However, putting the name of the $1 backers in the credits of the game seems like offering a lot for the smallest pledge possible. If you want to consider this, then put the credits into tiers, and state so on your campaign page. So, yes, at $1 you are in the credits, but that at the end of it, under “lost soul”. Whereas, maybe, at $10,000, you are the first in the list under “Patron of the Art”?

Then, the campaign offers to all backers at $15 and more to name an enemy NPC. That’s very nice. Maybe too nice again. First, that will require some good logistics management. Currently, the campaign has an average pledge of $30 per backers. If it gets funded, that’s more than 4,000 names to collect, check for inappropriate content, and to mix into the game. The last part, I am sure will be ok from the way it is described. But it also means you have a limited chance to run into the name you submitted.

To be fair, I think I would keep this reward, I would just try to make it “scale”. It says the name is for an enemy NPC, and it could be “ vampire hunters, crooked cops and monstrous underground abominations”. Well. Maybe at $20, you only get to name a crooked cop. Maybe to name a vampire hunter (much more badass), that’s for the $30 tier. And abominations (which I suspect you’d want to name differently than Jo Gumshoe) could be at $50?

The difference between the $50 and $100 pledge levels?

You have an in game gold plated credit card that’s purely cosmetic. Really?!? With all those cool “name a cool thing in the game” perks you have, what you get for spending twice as much as the previous level is a freaking, tacky, gold credit card? I am SURE the team could have found something a bit sexier had they tiered the “name an enemy NPC” reward.

Mistake #5 — Early Bird Tier

This is a small thing, but I think the Early Bird tier is limited in a too small quantity.

it is gone already, and it build a lot of the momentum. My usual rule is I try to have the total amount of all the Early Bird pledges (the low tier one, representing the core pledge at a discount) to represent between 10 to 20% of your total goal. Early Birds are here to get momentum at the beginning of a campaign, something everyone wants to see as it will make you more likely to succeed. With 200 Early Bird for Nighthawks, it gathered $6,000, or about 2.4% of the total. They are now gone, and they haven’t pushed the momentum that much.

A great alternative that is now available, if you are confident that the word will spread quickly in your community, is to do a time-limited Early Bird, for the first 48h of your campaign.

I understand why

I regularly do campaign reviews for upcoming campaigns, and my comments above are not very different from the ones I would do for them.

A studio is limited by its existing ressources and the skills they feel are their strong suit. So, here, the team has strong writing talent. And maybe visual design is at a premium from people in the team they’d rather not distract. You end up with a page that is way too wordy and not nearly visual enough.

The same goes with the video. Doing a commented gameplay video is a lot of time and energy, and not everyone is comfortable being recorded talking, regardless of their passion for the topic.

This is where it is important to step aside your own project and look at it through the eyes of your audience. I might love text-based games, but it doesn’t mean I will have the time and patience to wade through your campaign text. Unless you get hooked (usually by the visuals), you will go your own merry way rather than work towards understanding whether this game is for you.

As it stands, Nighthawks is very likely to be funded — it has a loving audience that is answering well to the campaign. But, I predict that the mid-campaign lull will be brutal, and many potential backers will be lost in a campaign that could have bought then in by being slightly more visually appealing.

Some of the mistakes above are too late to do anything about (the rewards cannot be edited), but there is still time to optimized how it is all presented. That would be a good move on the studio’s part.

The Many Mistakes of… Nighthawks was originally published in ICO —  Video games agency specializing in self-publishing on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.