Kickstarter sees massive uptick in pledges following Double Fine's success

Double Fine's adventure game project was the most successful Kickstarter in history, garnering over $3.4 million in funds and that's clearly had an effect on Kickstarter projects overall. On the official Kickstarter blog, the funding platform outlined just how important Double Fine's success has been to the health of the Kickstarter ecosystem.

Kickstarter wanted to allay any fears that hugely successful projects are taking away pledges from smaller guys. "Projects aren't fighting over a finite pool of Kickstarter dollars or backers. One project's backer isn't another project's loss. The backers that one project brings often end up backing other projects as well," Kickstarter stressed. "Each project is not only promoting itself, but the Kickstarter ecosystem as a whole."

There are actually more projects getting funding on Kickstarter than ever before (over 4,500), and Double Fine alone managed to bring in more than 60,000 new backers to Kickstarter; many of these people went on to pledge other projects too.

In the month prior to Double Fine, the video games category averaged 629 pledges per week, and after Double Fine, that figured skyrocketed to an average of 9,755 pledges per week, excluding pledges to Double Fine itself. Moreover, looking at the financial side, $1,776,372 was pledged to the video games category in Kickstarter's first two years, but in the six weeks after Double Fine, $2,890,704 was pledged - $6,227,075 if you include Double Fine's massive haul.

Kickstarter noted that of the 60,000 people whose first-ever pledge was to Double Fine, 13,715 of them (22 percent) have backed another project, totaling $877,171. The bulk of that (almost $640k) went to game-related projects.