The Funding Crowd: A Year In Review

And after the successes, it's time for some cold stats. As we said, a year of crowdfunding goes indeed a long way, producing a vast amount of data we've gathered in our crowdfunding wiki throughout all this time. And now we've gone all over it and we've crunched all those numbers in order to obtain some insights into the art of crowdfunding Linux games. These are the results:


· There is a total of 1,400 finished campaigns registered on our wiki: 1,055 from Kickstarter, and 345 from Indiegogo -- actually there is also a couple from other crowdfunding platforms, but they are so few that we chose to ignore them.


· Out of them, 435 were successful while 965 were not. That gives us a 31.1% success rate. Looking at these number by platform, we obtain a slightly better 38.5% success rate for Kickstarter (406/1,055), while Indiegogo must do with a meager 8.4% (29/345). This Indiegogo fiasco was to be expected though, as it could be easily concluded after the ad hoc analysis on the subject we performed last month. The Kickstarter figure, on the other hand, is slightly better than the overall 33.9% success rate for all Kickstarter gaming projects (3,361/9,917). We know that these numbers also include all non-video games campaigns, and nevertheless the difference might not be statistically significant, but we couldn't resist to share with you the fact that video game campaigns with Linux support are objectively more successful. :P


· The other side of the coin are the so-called abandoned projects. Now that's a rather hairy stat, as that category can equally fit an openly abandoned project and another one whose creators simply haven't clearly stated their intentions towards the game in the face of a failed campaign. So simply put, the stats we're going to show you most certainly include some games that are not abandoned at all, but we cannot keep track of every single one of them after a couple of days have passed since the end of their respective campaigns. Having been warned, here you go: out of the total 1,400 analyzed campaigns 528 of them can be tagged as abandoned, that's a 37.7% of abandonment rate. Again, Kickstarter comes off beter with a 29.2% (308/1,055) while Indiegogo presents a staggering 63.8% (220/345). A reasonable explanation is that Indiegogo, with its flexible-funding option, is the preferred venue for highly inexperienced developers with poorly crafted games that usually don't get funded and are subsequently abandoned.


· Another issue of interest to us is wether Linux support is included right at the start or it rather depends on a (sometimes unreasonable) stretch goal. Luckily, only a 13.2% of all projects decided to relegate our favourite OS to a stretch goal (185/1,400). Out of those 185 which did, little less than half of them were successful at the end: 76/185 for a 41.1%. The platform breakdown is yet again favourable to Kickstarter (74/148; 50.0%) rather than Indiegogo (2/37; 5.4%). So, in average, supporting Linux right off or conditioning the support to the achievement of a stretch goal doesn't seem to affect the ultimate outcome of a campaign.


· Finally, we analyzed the final funding marks of every campaign and we've combined them into these charts:





By observing these charts, we can draw some conclusions:

a) Interestingly enough, there are very few projects on either Kickstarter or Indiegogo with a funding mark between 50% and 100%: they either fail completely or succeed.

b) Among those that suceed, most of them attain a final funding mark no higher than 150%.

c) Therefore we could infer that, when a campaign is well above the 50% mark and success seems feasible, the final push from both backers (upping their pledges) and creators (spreading the word and reaching out to more gaming sites and social networks) most of the time makes it possible to achieve the funding goal, but not much more than that.




Finally, our egos wouldn't be satisfied if we didn't try to find out up to what extent we might have influenced the crowdfunding world from this humble tribune. So we've computed the same stats again but this time taking into account only those projects that have been featured in The Funding Crowd since its inception. These are the results:


· In the first 31 issues of our column we've featured a total of 334 finished campaigns: 281 from Kickstarter and 53 from Indiegogo.


· Out of them 156 were ultimately funded, that is a 46.7% success rate, which is significantly better than the overall 31.1% (score one for TFC! :P). As usual, our featured Kickstarter campaigns fared better (148/281; 52.7%) than their Indiegogo counterparts (8/53; 15.1%).


· The abandoned projects, with the same precautions as before, they represent the 15.0% of our total number of picks (50/334). The platform breakdown gives us a 11.7% rate for Kickstarter (33/281) and a 32.1% for Indiegogo (17/53). In both cases, these results are less than half the overall ones -- obviously, another TFC success.


· With regard to Linux support as a stretch goal, we at The Funding Crowd don't favour this practice and so we don't usually feature projects that do so. However, there's been some cases in the brief history of our column: 41 campaigns with a stretch goal for Linux support have appeared in our pages, what represents 12.3% of the total. And again we score another point as 23 of these 41 projects (all of them from Kickstarter) were ultimately successful, which is a better success rate than when considering all projects (56.1% vs 41.1%, to be precise).


· And finally, again, these are the final funding mark charts for our picks:




As you can clearly see and as we've made abundantly clear earlier, it seems that The Funding Crowd has had a decisive impact on those campaigns that have appeared in it. Numbers don't lie. Of course, the possibility exists that these results are biased in the sense that we tend to showcase those projects wich seem more likely to succeed and so their stats are better. But who doesn't like to think he/she's making a difference, right? So let us dream!





A few short years ago, if someone had told us such an amazing variety of games and game engines would come to Linux in a single year, we might have told them "suuure, dream on", but now crowdfunding is helping that dream come true, with Wasteland 2 being instrumental in finally pushing Unity to make their Linux port public... and Unity's success with cross-platform support helping inspire Unreal and CRYENGINE to follow suit! There are so many great crowdfunded games still in progress, we will have plenty to report on in the coming year -- hope you will join us. ;)





PS: If you'd like to see the mentioned stats in a more ordered fashion, we've compiled them on the wiki for your viewing and analyzing pleasure.


. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.