Since Kickstarter has become such an important source of new games, here is a brief look at the history of the company
Kickstarter launched in 2009 out of frustration co-founder
Perry Chen faced when he ran into difficulties promoting a concert and turned
to the Internet for funding. Finding
lots of interest among internet users wanting to support creative types,
Kickstarter started as a way for those interested in art and music to provide
support to the artists creating it.
Kickstarter supports the company by taking 5% of the proceeds of
projects that successfully fund. For
those of you that don’t like Amazon, grit your teeth when you fund a
Kickstarter project as Kickstarter uses Amazon to process pledge payments, with
Amazon taking another 3 to 5% of the contributions for the handling. Since launching, Kickstarter has had about
61,000 projects posted to the site and processed over 215 million dollars in
pledges but didn’t hit its first million dollar funding
until this past February, when a proposed solid aluminum iPod dock , originally
looking for $75,000, raised $1.4 million.
The most successful Kickstarter campaign so far has been for the Pebble, a watch with programmable
faces. Pebble Technologies originally
sought $100,000 to produce 1,000 of the watches and would up collected about
$10.3 million, selling about 85,000 watches, enabling the company to add 6
people to its staff within two weeks, tripling the company’s size.
The attention garnered by successful Kickstarter projects
such as these, and the Reaper and Giant In the Playground projects, obscures the fact that posting a project to Kickstarter
is nowise a guarantee of success. In
fact, according to Kickstarter, roughly 9% of all projects posted to the site
receive zero pledges. Less than 35% of
game projects and 32% of publishing projects successfully fund (the most
successful category: theater. Over 60% of theater projects launched on the
site have successfully hit their funding levels). Very few Kickstarter projects reach levels
that attract the attention of the media, with only seven so far breaking the $1
million mark, as far as I can find. The
most successful Kickstarter projects fall into two categories, 1) they come
from companies that already have a base of support for the project and are able
to drive support for the project by pushing it relentlessly to that fan base or
2) technology blogs or other media sources find about the project, view it as
novel or innovative, and start talking about it, creating awareness of it among
potential funders.
There is also the problem of, what happens if a project
funds but never gets produced. In the
early days of Kickstarter, projects were
typically musicians seeking funding from fans so they could produce another
album. Today, aKickstarter project is much more likely a
developer seeking funding by preselling
a product before producing it.
According to the terms of service on Kickstarter, if this happens , the
creator is supposed to refund all money fund to the backers but the company
provides no method for doing so on the website.
Since Kickstarter never has the
funds for a project, operating solely as a facilitator between creator and
funder, the company’s position is that
it does not give refunds and all
negotiations must take place between creator and backer.
According to a recent story on NPR
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