Less than half of Kickstarter's game projects have succeeded - report

Though Kickstarter is seen by many small and indie developers as a great way to finance game projects that might otherwise have trouble picking up a publisher, less than half of them have reached their funding goals. The crowdfunding platform has received plenty of press in recent months after high-profile projects from developers like Double Fine, InXile Entertainment (Wasteland 2), and Harebrained Schemes (Shadowrun Returns) managed to raise millions from fans on Kickstarter. But those successes might have overshadowed the many Kickstarter campaigns that have failed. Appsblogger scraped all of the campaigns posted on the service, and published an infographic showing that only 43 percent of the 1,729 game projects (includes board and card games) submitted to Kickstarter have succeeded. Taking into account live campaigns that are still accepting donations, likely close to half of game projects were unable to hit their goals. That percentage would be higher than Kickstarter's average: half of the platform's 45,815 submitted projects have succeeded, while 41.3 percent have failed. Games are the fourth least successful project type (out of 13). However, the Games category is the fourth largest in terms of money raised ($22.7 million), behind Design, Music, and Film & Video. And it's the third most popular in terms of backers who've pledged money to projects (449,562), following Music and Film & Video. Appsblogger also found that successful projects in general tend to have shorter durations (average of 38 days, versus an average of 43 days for failed projects). The pledge target for the average successful campaign ($5,487) is much lower than the average for failed ones ($16,635). As for projects that manage to not only reach their donation goal but more than double it -- as was the case with Double Fine, InXile, and Harebrained -- those successes are rare. Only 8.5 percent of funded campaigns have received more than double their initial target.