The crowdfunding phenomenon in game development this year has not hit a plateau just yet. In fact, looking at the numbers, it's maturing rapidly.
According to new research from Ico Partners, both the median and average price of successfully-funded Kickstarter games went up in the last three months.
If you were to line up every successfully-funded video game project on Kickstarter through the beginning of December in order of cheapest to most expensive, the project in the middle, or the median, (we were curious so we looked: it's either Lilly Looking Through or Malevolence) was funded for approximately $33,500.
Note that median is not average, but it is a more meaningful number given that high profile projects tend to skew the average. However, the average is on the rise as well: from $153K to $196k.
"Overall, it feels like the platform is on the path to maturity (for video games) and is getting there quite fast," said Ico analyst Thomas Bidaux.
It's not the crowdfunding that is as much the phenomenon as the wake up call the industry should be getting right now that they are completely off-base with their customers, so now their future potential customers are putting their wallets where they think they will get their desires fulfilled - directly into funding games.
This is definitely true, but the effect is very interesting too. We're finding that basically the masses are having a bit of a wake up call as to some of these projects. They're beginning to understand why publishers are so picky. However, even when the naivete wears off, they (we) know what we would like to see the most and a lot of publishers have been way off base this year.
Median is Lilly Looking Through, well spotted. Note though that it is the median on projects that raised more than $10,000 - not the median on all video game projects.
