Raised: $50,554 of $40,000 goal
Days to Success: 28
Backers: 1644
You know what is an absolutely fantastic space that few games explore? No, not actual space, but oceans. Just on Earth they stand as fascinating, terrifying, and mysterious locales and I’m glad to see more games are finally diving in. Diluvion is one such game. Players control a submarine (as well as handle the crew housed within) and attempt survive their many battles. Although battle segments take on a third-person 3D look, inside the submarine everything has an outrageously good-looking 2D style. In all, the project already seem strikingly polished. My hope is that this polish extends beyond the visual design and makes for a great underwater combat game.
Neptune Flux (Previous Coverage)
Raised: $10,070 of $8,000 goal
Days to Success: 27
Backers: 382
Oh, would you look at that, it’s another underwater-based game! However, unlike the previously mentioned Diluvion, this is a far more exploration-focused title. Neptune Flux is viewed much more as an adventure game that just happens to take place in the vast oceans. You’re simply looking to carry out a job for your company, but it seems there is something to discover while doing so which proves there’s more to this whole project than meets the eye. Given the landscape, the visuals look properly dark and even a bit frightening. With upcoming support for Oculus Rift it’ll probably prove an exceptionally frightening experience even if no creatures snap out of the darkness at you.
Purrfectly Ever After (Previous Coverage)
Raised: $12,522 of $7,555 goal
Days to Success: 29
Backers: 341
Folks should know that I’ve always got my eye out for visual novels, so it should be little surprise to find Purrfectly Ever After highlighted here. Not only is it a great looking upcoming visual novel, but it also happens to be of the otome variety. As a cat-turned-young-woman protagonist, you’ll be able to select from a cast of hunky men, all with voice actors (in Japanese, no less)! As for the storyline, well, I’m also intrigued. It was surprising to see such an impressive campaign jump out of the gate from an indie team (even if Sekai Project did step in to publish them in the end). Fingers crossed for even more otome games on Kickstarter in the future!
Shape of the World (Previous Coverage)
Raised: $63,062 of $60,222 goal
Days to Success: 27
Backers: 1198
Some folks out there use the term “walking simulator” as an insult. That’s fine for them, as it leaves more exploration-focused titles for the rest of us! Getting to inhabit a new, unique world always thrills me and that looks to be exactly what Shape of the World will provide players. The landscape is colored in ways completely different from any reality I’ve ever experienced, and beckons folks to walk deeper on in. Is there more to the experience than that? Sure, I’ve got to assume as much, since there’s got to be something at the end of the triangle glyph pathways. I suppose we’ll find out whenever it launches.
We Happy Few (Previous Coverage)
Raised: $265,752 of $201,353 goal
Days to Success: 23
Backers: 7433
What is We Happy Few exactly? I’ll tell you one thing: Stylish. From the moment it launched it carried a stylish sense of self unlike much of anything else that has come to Kickstarter. There’s a reason for that too. This is the same team that brought out Contrast a few years ago. Although I wasn’t particularly in love with that title, it definitely oozed personality which is rarer than you might think in the game development environment. Compulsion Games seem to be producing a title which looks far beyond much of its peers and I for one am looking forward to what this alternate 60’s, druggy roguelike brings to the table.
Well, we made it through July! As with each month, there are copious Kickstarter campaigns coming to a close and this one was no different. What is interesting is how well July kept up with June in regards to successful projects. Last month was a bit of an outlier thanks to Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Yooka-Laylee — but July had its own special circumstances. In total, $8,708,511 was raised by all 31 successful campaigns. A huge chunk of this amount is attributed to Shenmue 3 with its impressive $6.3 million in funding and The Bard’s Tale IV was certainly no slouch with $1.5 million raised either. Add those together and you’ll see that a massive chunk of the total funding value is parceled out to those two alone. In any case, let’s look beyond the heaviest hitters for a moment.
Curious to know how the other best performers this month fared? We Happy Few came in third place with a very respectable $265,752 in funding. Fantastically, this wasn’t a sequel to a known property. Indie developer Compulsion Games are actually pretty niche but it appears their stylish, creepy stealth game excited many. The fourth most-funded campaign of July was Regalia – Of Men and Monarchs. This is another great win for indie teams as developer Pixelated Milk themselves seem new to the scene. Even so, their project shows that they’ve got the skills to create a tactical RPG reminiscent of genre classics.
Now let’s take a look at how much money all these 31 campaigns were asking for combined. In total, the accumulated goal value sat at exactly $3,830,242. That’s a serious bunch of bucks, especially when you consider June’s total goal amount was $1.8 million. It’s a bit surprising to see this one be so much more until you realize that both Shenmue 3 and The Bard’s Tale IV priced their projects at over a million each. Heck, that probably still isn’t truly enough to fully fund either title, but at least it appears some developers are pushing closer to “honest” game development budgets on crowdfunding sites. The average value asked between everyone was $123,556. However, removing the two outlier campaigns this average drops tremendously to $20,008.
Goals are one thing, but since every campaign in this article was successful let’s turn our attention to those values specifically. The average amount of funding received averages out to $280,920 without any modification. Of course, we simply must remove those two tremendous successes (and statistical anomalies) from our average. Once that’s taken care of it drops tremendously to $29,501. Raising nearly $30,000 from Kickstarter is a great feat, but of course not everyone can manage it. The lowest successful funding value was $36 from PrisonBreak RPG!, but that low information campaign was likely funded by family alone. If you would like to take a look at all 31 successes this month then just scroll to the bottom of this article for a list.
Do you remember a time when it seemed that Kickstarter campaigns were getting funded within hours one after another? It’s not possible for me to know if that time was real or more of a misperception, but in 2015 I’m keeping track of just how long it takes projects to be funded. July shows much the same sort of result as months prior. Very, very few campaigns were funded within the first week. Instead, most managed to make their Kickstarter goal only as the days drug on into the final week. Please note that the “over 31 days” listing relates to Kickstarters which have a run time that exceeds the standard 30/31 days. Some campaigns are set to run for 40 days or longer. The fact that many of these only make their goal near the end of an extended funding period is a bit frightening.
Although I’m not yet sure how this information will be important, I’ve once again gathered counts of currency used for each Kickstarter. As you might expect, the majority of campaigns raised funding via US dollars (19 in all). Five campaigns utilized Pounds, five were AUD, three were CAD, and zero Kickstarter projects using Euro were victorious this month. There doesn’t appear to be a huge difference between these results and June’s. I have to assume the majority will always favor USD, but will keep an eye on this regardless. It’s also worth remembering that currency alone does not suggest that US campaigns are by default more successful. After all, sometimes projects may be from developers in a country that actually does not use the currency their Kickstarter is running in.
Just as with June, this month’s graph displaying backers per campaign looks outrageously silly. This is because two choice campaigns have so many more backers than anything else. Their values are so high in fact that you can’t even see the green bar for most other projects! That’s where the backer number comes in so you can still get a grasp of how many folks funded what. In total, there were 126,664 backers maximum who pledged this month. The true number is no doubt somewhat smaller because this value doesn’t account for people who back multiple projects in a month. The average amount of backers per campaigns is 4085, but that’s including our two star campaigns. Removing them drops the average down to 813 instead. That’s still a totally healthy amount of backers, of course.
Now it’s time to consider the amount pledged to all these great campaigns in July. The average backer contribution per campaign value is $45.80. That is absolutely fantastic when you consider tiers for copies of games (usually the most popular) are closer to (or below) $20. Folks really, really seem to appreciate extraneous goodies when they’re cool enough. If you remove the outlier campaigns where average backer value was over $100 bucks — which is supremely unusual — it drops a bit to $35.29. Now, just a second ago I suggested an average value for a game reward tier. I’ve also been collecting data on tiers to be able to actually have proof of these claims rather than just assumptions. For July, the average price for a tier including a copy of the crowdfunded game landed at $16. The very lowest tier averaged about $4, while highest tier possible averaged out at $2,677.
There is always more information to generate from Kickstarter video game campaign data, but these are just the most notable tidbits to us. If you’d like to know something else (more specific to one campaign, or other stats) then please let us know in the comments with inquiries and suggestions. We look forward to continue sharing monthly wrap ups throughout the year! You can review analysis and wrap-up articles from previous months using this link. Want to review all successful Kickstarters for 2015 so far? Check out our continuously update page right here!
Here’s a look at each successful campaign in a handy table to get a glimpse at (a small sampling of) the information we gathered to make this post possible:
Always a pleasure to read those post of yours 😉