Kickstarter’s Video Game Production Revolution

Since the creation of crowed funding there has been an array of mixed opinions on whether crowed funding is a viable alternative to other financial methods. From claims such as “crowdfunding is the next big investing trend” from Drew Hendricks Forbes contributor (Hendricks, 2014) to CEO Yaniv Tross claiming most crowdfunding campaigns are nothing more than a mere marketing scheme and going as far to distinguish crowdfunding from “real funding”. (Tross, 2014) The goal of this paper is to examine the viability of the crowed funding platform “Kickstart” for video game development. Furthermore this paper examines the Pareto distribution within the Kickstart video game category in order to see the degree of inequality of distribution in funding. It is important to examine the equality distribution in order to be able to discuss the presuppositions that Kickstart is a worthwhile alternative to achieve funding. Additionally this paper compares the review rating of randomly selected Kickstarter games on “Steam” to randomly selected games on “Steam” in order to examine the presumption that crowed funded video games are better than other video games. The paper than examines if there is a correlation between the amount of discourse of a game during the campaign and the Steam rating received. The paper also examines the correlation between the amounts of updates during the Kickstarter campaign and the Steam review received. The paper then examines if there is a correlation between the amount of funding received and the Steam ratings received. Finally the paper exams the correlation between the amount of backers and Steam rating received. If Kickstarter proves to be a financially viable option for video game development and additionally creates higher rated video game the implication of Kickstarter potential would be colossal. This would mean that Kickstarter could potentially replace the current video game development models. For this reason it is extremely important to examine both the financial and the game quality aspect of the video games produced by Kickstarter.