Kickstarter, the Internet funding phenomenon for independent projects, is already having a major effect in fields as varied as graphic novel publishing, movie-making, video games, and tabletop gaming. With all the success of various projects that are put up on the site to attract production funding from a multitude of small investors, there are bound to be disappointments, especially when the proposed projects appear to be of lower quality or address categories with little sustained interest for the Kickstarter audience. But what about the site’s signal successes like the video game Double Fine Adventure and the Webcomic Order of the Stick, both of which raised over a million dollars. Did they suck too much of the potential financing out of the system and leave the other 4,500 Kickstarter projects gasping for air?
Not according to a blog post on the Kickstarter site. The Double Fine Adventure game actually raised over $3 million from nearly 90,000 investors, two-thirds of which had never invested on Kickstarter before. In the month before Double Fine launched Kickstarter’s video games category averaged 629 pledges per week, but after the launch the category averaged 9,755 pledges per week (excluding those that went to Double Fine). Before Double Fine launched on February 6th, only one video game project had received more than $100K, but now nine have. Wasteland 2, another video game that has received more than a million dollars in pledges took in $400,000 in pledges from Double Fine’s first time backers. Twenty-two percent of the 60,000 first-time backers who were brought to the site by Double Fine have pledged an additional $875,000 to 1,200 different projects including nearly $640,000 to other game projects and $45,000 to various comic-related projects.
A similar effect can be seen from the Webcomic project Order of the Stick, which celebrates and satirizes tabletop role-playing games and medieval fantasy, and which raised over $1.25 million from nearly 15,000 backers. Comics is much more established category on Kickstarter, but the positive effect of the interest generated by Order of the Stick can be seen in the weekly average of 780 pledges per week to the comics category before the January 23rd launch of Order of the Stick, which more than doubled to 1,653 pledges to the category (excluding those to Order) in the month after the launch. Twenty-two percent of the more than 11,000 individuals who made first time pledges to Order of the Stick, have gone on to invest in other projects with over 3,000 of them ponying up nearly $110 K for various game projects, and 710 investing a total of $43 in other comic-related projects.
Taken together the two mega-projects Double Fine and Order of the Stick raised four-and-one-half million dollars, and the first-time backers of those projects have pledged over a million dollars to over 1,000 other projects. At least at this stage in its development, it appears that each new highly successful project brings in new investors and that more than a fifth of these newbies find other projects on the site to invest in.
