Crowdfunding gives game industry a boost

“When we went to Kickstarter, people were starting to write articles that Kickstarter was dead,” said Chris Bourassa, cofounder and creative director of Red Hook Studios.

He was speaking to the Georgia Straight by phone from his Vancouver office, where the Red Hook team is working on new downloadable content for its Kickstarter-backed game Darkest Dungeon.

Bourassa and his business partner Tyler Sigman started the game’s crowdfunding campaign in February 2014. They were looking for $75,000, which they raised within 24 hours of launch.

“If people are decrying the end of something, you can slip in and try to do it properly,” Bourassa said. “I have some fond memories of that time, but it was definitely really intense.”

The game racked up 9,639 backers—the most of any Vancouver crowdfunded project.

In all, successful Kickstarter campaigns have raised $20.4 million for Vancouver businesses. They vary from sketch-show web series to public-art displays and include kids’ books, kebab makers, and a man who raised $10 to make baby food.

A data analysis of successfully funded and currently running Vancouver-based Kickstarter projects shows that games get the most backers of any category. Games racked up almost 60,000 total supporters. Product-design campaigns counted more than 56,000 benefactors, while design projects got more than 47,000 financers.

Projects on Kickstarter can be listed in multiple categories, meaning a campaign labelled as “product design” and “design” would count its backers (or money earned) in both categories.

Bourassa feels that the game industry has got a noticeable boost from Kickstarter. “I do think Kickstarter’s a great platform for smaller games studios, or even individuals who want to make something,” he said. “It’s wonderful for the game-development ecosystem, especially indie games.”

The project on the site with the most backing is a card game named Exploding Kittens, which has more than 219,000 financers. Shenmue III holds the record for the most-supported (69,320 backers) and mostfunded (US$6.3 million) video game on the platform, and it is also the seventh-most-funded project ever.

But having a lot of backers doesn’t necessarily correlate to making a huge profit. Darkest Dungeon, for instance, isn’t even one of the 10 mostfunded local projects, coming in at 11 with $313,337.

Vessi Footwear’s waterproof shoes were the only local Kickstarter to earn more than $1 million—one of only 300 projects ever to do so on the site—and they boasted the secondhighest number of backers, with 7,654. But shoes are more expensive than a video game, meaning Vessi had a much higher average donation per supporter ($134.08) than Darkest Dungeon ($32.51).

In total, Vancouver-based games have earned more than $3 million in donations, while product-design projects have raised over $7.3 million.

Film and video projects are the most numerous local Kickstarters, with 281 campaigns and 112 successful projects listed. Design (92 successful