Based on data culled by a fan between 2009 to 2012, Kickstarter needs to clean up shop on their successfully crowdfunded game projects quite a bit. Only one out of three developers have been able to deliver games as promised.
The study covers 366 projects within that timeframe, and also gleams other interesting findings. For one thing, the growth Kickstarter experienced within that time frame was truly exponential. Beginning with 5 game related Kickstarters to 2009, rising to 21 in 2010, 69 in 2011, and 271 in 2012. This rise in number of projects does not correlate to the absolute number of undelivered games. Overall, the proportion of undelivered games has stayed consistent since 2010.
If you factor in partial delivery, things do look a little better, with one in three developers having delivered something to backers. By partial delivery, we refer to splitting up the game into several deliverables, or cutting out some parts, such as not releasing the mobile version. This is something that became more prevalent in 2011.
Perhaps most telling is what the data says in terms of scale. It turns out the bigger the project was, the more likely that it was unable to deliver on the game as promised. On average, projects at $ 138,000 were successful, and those at an average of $ 150,000 were unsuccessful. The distribution, however, reveals that more unsuccessful projects ranged at $ 1 million and above.
The author makes their own conclusions, but do you feel there might be a mistake with the data and interpretation here? For the sake of discussion, the author has also shared their raw data for scrutiny. If you care to double check their data and findings yourself, you can do so here.
