The Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter was a huge success, but it’s also provided a windfall of good fortune to other Kickstarter projects.
The Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter is far and away the most successful Kickstarter of all time, bringing in $3.4 million from gamers anxious for some of that old-time Tim Schafer magic. But do all those people throwing all that money at a single project mean that other projects will suffer? Are the little guys at risk of being crowded out by one or two mega-Kickstarters?
Based on what’s happened since the DFA Kickstarter launched, the answer is a definite “no.” In fact, if anything Double Fine’s effort vastly increased awareness of Kickstarter and attracted a huge number of people eager to invest in various other projects that tickle their fancies, particularly in the videogame category. In the first two years of Kickstarter’s existence, $1,776,372 had been pledged to various projects in the category; in the six weeks since, $2,890,704 has been pledged, and that figure doesn’t include Double Fine’s own numbers. Add that to the total and you have $6,227,075 in six weeks, almost quadruple the total pledge over the previous two years.
Even better, of the roughly 60,000 people who made their first-ever Kickstarter pledge to the Double Fine Adventure, 13,715 of them – nearly a quarter – have since contributed to other projects. Games are unsurprisingly the biggest beneficiary but categories ranging from Technology and Film & Video to Fashion, Food and Dance have all seen support from people who were first attracted by Double Fine, to the tune of over $875,000 across 1226 projects.
A similar effect can be seen in the wake of the Order of the Stick Kickstarter, which raised over $1.2 million for a new printing of the War and XPs webcomic compilation. “Even in Comics, one of the more established categories on Kickstarter, you can see a big bump,” the Kickstarter Blog says. “In the month before Order of the Stick, the Comics category got an average of 780 pledges per week. After the launch of Order of the Stick, that doubled to 1653 pledges per week.”
“Combined, Double Fine and Order of the Stick have raised more than $4.5 million, and their first-time backers have pledged another $1,083,937 to 1000 other projects,” it continues. “Double Fine and Order of the Stick’s achievements have inspired tons of press and even other projects – more than 200 of their backers have started projects of their own.”
Another positive trend was started last week by Brian Fargo, the man behind the impressively successful Wasteland 2 Kickstarter [$1.6 million and counting], who launched the “Kick It Forward” campaign calling on funded Kickstarters to pledge five percent of the profits from their finished products to other Kickstarter projects.
