Kickstarter thanks Double Fine for massive bump in business
It seems old-school adventure game fans are a generous bunch.
Double Fine's hugely successful Kickstarter initiative to fund a new old-school adventure game has brought the crowdsourcing hub a massive increase in pledge numbers.
A lengthy blog post from Kickstarter published earlier today revealed that Double Fine Adventure brought more than 60,000 first time backers to the site, and they've stuck around to help get more projects off the ground, both gaming-related and otherwise.
Before Double Fine came along, Kickstarter's games category averaged 629 pledges a week. That's soared to 9755 a week since Double Fine's drive went live, not including pledges to Double Fine itself.
A total of $1,776,372 had been pledged to video game projects in Kickstarter's first two years, but $2,890,704 has been pledged in the six weeks after Double Fine - or $6,227,075 if you count Tim Schafer's project too.
Pre-DFA, only one video game project had exceeded $100,000, but post-DFA, nine have.
What's more, of the 60,000 newcomers who donated to DFA, 13,715 have since pledged an additional $875,000 across 1200 different projects. Around $250,000 of that total was given to projects that are not game-related.
"Projects aren't fighting over a finite pool of Kickstarter dollars or backers. One project's backer isn't another project's loss," argued the post.
"The backers that one project brings often end up backing other projects as well. Each project is not only promoting itself, but the Kickstarter ecosystem as a whole."
New video game Kickstarters seem to be popping up almost weekly. We've had Brian Fargo's successful attempt at launching Wasteland 2, Halo Reach designer Christian Allen's not-so-successful attempt to fund old-school tactical shooter Takedown and, most recently, MonkeyPaw Games has called for financial help with localising JRPGs.