Ever since Double Fine's record-breaking Kickstarter campaign, the crowd-funding community hasn't been quite the same. Kickstarter on Thursday quantified those changes, revealing data that shows a massive boost in funding for game-related projects across the entire site.
In a recent blog post, Kickstarter revealed that Double Fine's project attracted more than 60,000 first-time backers, and drove a dramatic boost for the number of pledges going to other game-related projects.
The organization said that in the month before Double Fine entered the scene, the Video Games category on Kickstarter averaged 629 pledges a week; after Double Fine's debut, that number jumped to 9,755 (excluding the pledges that went to Double Fine itself).
Looking at this data, Kickstarter said that Double Fine's success breathed new life into the crowd-funding model by attracting new backers for all sorts of other projects, such as inXile's similarly successful campaign for Wasteland 2 and Stoic Studio's indie RPG The Banner Saga.
With this dramatic boost in Kickstarter popularity, the Video Games category on the site has pulled in roughly $2.9 million in the six weeks following Double Fine's debut. That's quite an impressive sum, since the category only saw $1.7 million over the first two years of Kickstarter's life.
The organization also noted that when one project finds success, it doesn't mean that others lose backers. Rather, data has shown that as large projects bring in new audiences, many of those backers tend to pledge money toward other projects as well.
The following chart details the total number of pledges to the Video Game category before and after Double Fine's project debut (Double Fine pledges not included):
