World Class Villains

I’ll make the list public on Google Docs soon. (Image sourced from: Flickr)

I’ve always meant to come back to the issue of how many successful video game Kickstarter projects actually deliver their title, but manually scraping the list together takes time that has been hard to find.

Until now.

I’ve completed updating the list from 2009 to the end of 2012. Soon I’ll be putting up a couple of posts that (again) looks at the outcome of backers getting what they’ve put money towards and some of my observations based on what I’ve seen in the 360+ projects. The data entry side of things is done – next up is some analysis and then putting up my comments here.

I must have a form of Stockholm Syndrome, because towards the end there I was really enjoying finding out what each new project was up to.

Why 2012? Why Not 2013?

Because titles that were successfully funded at the end of 2013 won’t have had a chance to release anything. By looking at projects that were successful up to the 31 December 2012, there has been an entire year for the game developers to deliver something… or to disappear, as the case may be.

As a minor observation based on reviewing these successful Kickstarters, any backer should add on at least six months – if not a year – to the estimated project delivery dates shown on the project page. I’ve seen several projects that 12 months after collecting the money are only just getting around to sending out the physical rewards and are still a long way from delivering the game that the backers have financed.

What Do You Mean, Outdated?

There’s always a chance that someone has posted an update that changes the status of their project in the few days since I started reviewing everything. It’s only been a week from start to finish, but that’s long enough for a few things to sneak through. Overall though I’m pretty happy with the data quality of the list though, so those should be isolated cases.