Half a Billion Dollars Has Been Pledged to Games on Kickstarter

Since the crowdfunding site's launch, over $500 million has been pledged to game projects on Kickstarter, it announced this week.

Video games account for roughly 37 percent of that, with $186 million raised through the site. The majority of the money has gone to tabletop games, which account for $265 million. The remaining $49 million has gone to game projects that don't fit into either category.

That money has come from over 2.2 million backers, who have helped almost 8,000 projects to get off the ground. These have come in many forms, from Cards Against Humanity to Broken Age, FTL, Shovel Knight, and Divinity: Original Sin, among many others. The number of quality games to come from Kickstarter--where they were either fully funded or simply helped along near the end of their development--is too great to recount them all here.

To date, Shenmue III is the highest-funded video game on Kickstarter, raising just over $6.3 million. That also makes it the eighth highest-funded project on the site overall, and third in the games space behind the ill-fated Ouya ($8.5 million) and card game Exploding Kittens ($8.7 million). Of course, this all pales in comparison to Star Citizen, which raised $2.1 million through Kickstarter and has gone on to attract a total of almost $115 million.

The games category has been responsible for roughly one-fifth of the site's total pledges, but less than eight percent of its funded projects. $2.4 billion has been pledged through the site to a total of about 107,000 funded projects.