The Funding Crowd: Another Year In Review

Time for some stats! Being the second year we go over the data produced by hundreds of Linux-supporting (or at least Linux-promising) crowdfunding campaigns out there, this time we won't have to make do with merely telling you the numbers, we are now able to compare them with last year's and try to guess some trends and draw some conclusions. Let's do it, then:


· This last year we added 847 finished campaigns to our wiki: 709 from Kickstarter and 138 from Indiegogo. These figures are significantly lower than those registered during the first year of existence of TFC, namely: 1,055 from KS and 345 from IGG (1,400 total). One partial explanation for this descent in campaigns would be that over the time we've become considerably more nitpicky when adding projects to the wiki:

"What've you got here? A campaign with no pitch video, a couple of pictures (true screenshots instead of hand-drawn concept art if we're extremely lucky), and a single paragraph explaining the project with grammar so bad that would make Samuel Johnson turn in his grave at Westminster Abbey? No thanks, won't bother considering it as it's clear this won't get a single penny in a thousand years." You think we are exaggerating? Have you ambled through Kickstarter or (especially) Indiegogo as of late?

Anyway, though our biases may have certainly played a part in those lower figures, we feel there must be some part of truth in them, and probably there have been less crowdfunding campaigns for Linux games this last year. Unfortunately we don't have the figures for the overall videogames projects with or without Linux support, so we cannot guess whether this is a general trend or that developers have become more cautious before promising things they aren't sure to be able to fulfill like a Linux build for their games...


· As per the success rates of this year's projects, we must report a 34.4% (291 successes and 556 failures), which is a very similar rate to last year's 31.1%. The same can be said if we only take into consideration the Kickstarter projects (36.8% the second year, vs 38.5% the first), but the funding rate for the Indiegogo campaigns has almost tripled (from 8.4% to 21.7%). We entirely blame our more strict criteria when entering a campaign in the wiki for this increase, though.

Another interesting point is that, just like last year, the Kickstarter ratio is slightly better than the overall 32% success rate for all Kickstarter gaming projects (5,723 out of 11,516). Again, these numbers also include non-video games campaigns and all in all the difference might not be statistically relevant, but we couldn't resist to boast about the fact that video game campaigns with Linux support are objectively more successful than those without.


· After the successes, let's turn our attention towards the so-called abandoned projects. Preliminary warning: the stats we're going to show you are most certainly inexact, as we consider a project to be abandoned if its creators haven't crearly stated that they will keep developing the game within a couple of days after the campaign ends. So it's totally possible that out of all the projects we've put in the abandoned bag, many of them aren't abandoned at all. Having been warned, here you go: out of the total 847 analyzed campaigns 266 of them can be tagged as abandoned, that's a 31.4% of abandonment rate, slightly better than last year's 37.7%. Again Kickstarter comes off better with a 28.6% (203 out of 709, almost exactly like last year's 29.2%) while Indiegogo presents a clearly worse 45.7% (63 out of 138), which nonetheless is considerably better than last year's staggering 63.8%. Yet again we can partially explain this improvement with our more selective methods, even though is not less true that Indiegogo, having the flexible-funding option, is the preferred option for inexperienced devs with shittypoorly crafted games that usually don't get funded and are subsequently abandoned.


· Finally, let's take a look at the funding marks attained by all the campaigns during the last 12 months:


As you can see by comparing them with last year's graphs, the general conclusions that can be extracted are effectively the same:

a) Very few projects, both on Kickstarter or Indiegogo, attain a funding mark between 50% and 100%: they either fail completely or succeed.

b) Among the successful ones, most of them reach a final funding mark no higher than 150%.

c) So we can again conclude that when a campaign is well above the 50% mark and success seems achievable, the final push usually makes it possible to reach the funding goal. In other words, people seem to be making an effort only if they perceive it's worth it. Which maybe is telling us something interesting about human nature, especially considering that Kickstarter campaigns are all fixed funding, so upping your pledge shouldn't affect you in any way if the campaign fails after all...




Since we are still a bunch of narcissistic suckers we looked again into the same stats as above but this time only considering the projects that we've covered in The Funding Crowd. These are the results:


· From issues #32 through #47, our column has featured a total of 91 finished campaigns: 79 from Kickstarter and 12 from Indiegogo. These numbers are prominently lower than the 334 projects we reported last year (281 KS, 53 IGG), but that was to be expected after we increased our publishing period up to once every three weeks. On the other hand we now have more time to research our picks and we hope it shows in the quality of our articles!


· Out of those 91 projects, 79 were ultimately funded. That's an astonishingly high 86.8% success rate which almost doubles last year's 46.7% and, needless to say, puts to shame the current overall 34.4%. We can confidently say that we have learned to spot the winners, haven't we?


· The abandoned projects, with the same precautions as before, only amount to the 7.7% of the total number of our picks (7 out of 91), which is also almost half of last year's 15.0% rate.


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


When compared to the same data for the first year of TFC, you can clearly see the improved results obtained by our picks. It almost seems as if The Funding Crowd has a decisive impact on those campaigns appearing in it. As we said we are quite egotistic, but we are sensible enough as to realize it's probably the other way around: since we now have more time to look for candidates and researching them, and we also are more trained on the crowdfunding battlefield, we are more effective in separating the wheat from the chaff to spot the most interesting projects that have more chances of success.



We at The Funding Crowd believe that crowdfunding is here to stay. As we have seen, the raw number of Linux games projects has slightly decreased this past year but the success rate has remained almost the same. Plus, the list of crowdfunded games released during this period is amazing to say the least. And considering that in the following months and years we'll see the release of behemoths like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Mighty No. 9, Yooka-Laylee, Shroud of the Avatar, the new Shadowrun, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Project Phoenix, or Armikrog, we cannot help letting our excitement go through the roof. Next year we expect to be reporting the release of most of the aforementioned incoming games, as well as lots of new successful Linux-friendly crowdfunding campaigns. 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: first year - second year. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.