Kickstarter is still the Wild West, for all the good and bad that entails: good in that there is still a lot of potential left unexplored, but bad in that there is still a lot of uncertainty for those who want to use it.
While there's never going to be a scientific formula for determining if your Kickstarter game will be a hit, some good hard numbers to reflect on should help you make better decisions.
The following information is courtesy of ICO Partners, which recently conducted a study on all Kickstarter games over $10,000 that were successfully funded through September 1.The median for a successful game is $29kThat is to say, if you line up the funding totals for every successful Kickstarter game through September 1 from lowest to highest, you'd have about $28,739 right in the middle. This is up from $19k when a similar study was done in June.
Note that median is not the same as average - if you were to average the price of all of the successful projects, you'd be over $165k. However, that price is skewed heavily by games with an extremely high level of funding at the top, so the median is a more useful figure.On average, funded games more than double their asking priceSpecifically, the average percentage of funding achieved on a successful Kickstarter game over $10k is 218 percent. This is down a bit from the average of 267 percent in June.Expensive games are getting more popularAs of June, games raising more than $250,000 went up from 40 percent of all projects to 54 percent, suggesting that the platform is maturing toward allowing larger projects.
This was proven just today, as the Homestuck adventure game was successfully funded at $2,485,481, making it the third highest-funded video game in Kickstarter's history.No room in the middleThat said, it is worth noting that very few projects receive funding between $100k and $250k. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground: successful projects tend to be either really big or really small.
To put this in perspective: the median for games funded over $250k is just over $655k, while the median for anything below is only $17k!
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They have an average user donation of $100 per backer....that just seems very suspicious.
I'm currently on kickstarter for an original idea acronym based word game where players earn points and win/lose challenges against each other. The game is called Gadzookery. It's not getting noticed though, so despite the game being around 80% built already it may not get the last 3k it needs to get finished. It seems unless a project is offering trinkets there's not much love for them. I'm wondering to myself if KS is becoming just another ebay to sell your trinkets instead of giving projects a kickstart for the sake of giving them a kickstart. I hope I'm wrong because that model would crowd the creative types out in favor of the business people.