Note on the methodology вЂ“В Reminder on how data is gathered. I think so, but it is still quite early to say.ДЄnd for what itвЂ™s worth, April is looking good so far. I am wondering if that effect has weakened somewhatВ (it was a very videogame specific effect, other categories didnвЂ™t see much of this) and if this is perhaps anotherВ part of the evolution of the crowd funding ecosystem for games.

I used to tell everyone that big successes on Kickstarter were always helping the smaller projects, bringing attention to the platform and driving traffic to games that had more limited communication means. But looking beyond those five very well funded projects, it seems like that quarter has not been performing on par with last year. Q1 2015 has started really well, from a money raised standpoint.

So, I am left with an interesting question. It means that Q1 2015 has had quite a few very well funded projects in proportion to Q1 2014 (and belying what was seen in Q1 2013 too). And a similar ratio of projects getting funded (roughly 19.5% in both cases). While money-wise, this year seems ahead of 2014, looking at the number of funded projects, we are in the same range as 2014 for the same quarter. Looking at the number of projects though,В it paints a slightly different picture. Purely in terms of money raised, 2015 is having a great start.ДЄs shown above, Q1 is historically not the strongest quarter, and already more than $8.5 million has been pledged for videogame projects. Probably helped by a few larger projects again. However, projects that get funded are well provided, this is the second highest quarter per money pledged. Getting visibility then is extra hard, we can see it has a lower than average ratio of projects getting funded (true for both years). Q4 is the pre-Xmas insane rush period for the game industry. But it also has the highest number of projects submitted (possibly thatвЂ™s when hobbyist projects get launched as they have more time then?) вЂ“ it doesnвЂ™t prevent them to get funded though. I suspect big projects avoid to launch during the summer (wisely). Both years, it hadВ the lowest quarter of money raised. The best quarter in both years in terms of revenues and a strongВ proportion of funded projects (slightly higher ratio of funded projects as well, especially last year). This means that we can expect it to accrue less funds. ItвЂ™s after Christmas, and there are fewer projects overall. Here is how I see the quarterly patterns: Prior to 2012 the numbers are just too low, and 2012 numbers themselvesВ areВ incredibly skewedВ by the fact that it took off after Q1. We are still in the early days of crowd funding, and I only have 2 years to look at properly: 20. Quarter-to-Quarter analysisД«efore looking into 2015, I looked at Quarter-to-Quarter trends from the previous years вЂ“ with the idea of providing more context when looking at the Q1 number for the current year in relation to patterns from previous years. Being 3 months in 2015, now seems like a good time to reviewВ how the year has started, and how it compares to last yearвЂ™s trends. In my last blog post on Kickstarter, I explained how there was a significant drop in the amount of money that went to video games over the past year.

Kickstarter video games