If you’re a game developer, journalist, or a curious crowdfunding fan, it can be pretty difficult to find solid in-depth Kickstarter data. The reason is that gathering Kickstarter video game data can be a bit of a struggle, particularly if you don’t want to violate Kickstarter’s terms of use by using things like scrapers and crawlers. Sure, there are plenty of Kickstarter consultants out there, but their data is typically gathered via scraping, and it can cost hundreds of dollars.
At Cliqist we have a Kickstarter video game data file that we’ve built up by hand over the past year or so. It includes data on every successful video game campaign going back to the very first one, High Strangeness. We’ve used it to put together some developer-centric articles, as well as track those campaigns that are MIA. However, we’re looking to expand it while making it available to everyone with no strings or cost attached. As part of the expansion effort we’re going to be starting almost from scratch to ensure that the data is as accurate as possible, and that it represents information that’s actually useful. For example: someone scraping Kickstarter data will typically indicate how many posts and updates the campaign has at that exact moment, but how many comments and updates were made during the campaign?
Obviously gathering the data will take quite a while, but we’ll be sharing it along the way. In the end we’ll have some very useful information for curious data nuts, developers looking to start their own campaigns, and journalists looking for solid numbers.
This is where you all come in. We have all the standard fields covered (goal, funded amount, launch and end dates, location, and so on), but what would you like to see? Pledge levels? Backer dispersion across pledge levels? First level to give a digital or physical copy? Let us know below or by emailing me at greg@cliqist.com and we’ll make sure that we do our best to get the data that’s important to you.
If you’re interested in getting our somewhat rough successful campaign data then just shoot me an email and I’ll send it your way. In the future we’ll make it accessible directly on the site, hopefully with some snazzy tools to help you run the numbers.
