We might be long past the days of games companies raising eye-watering figures on Kickstarter, but the platform is still a viable way to raise money to fund – at last part of – your game.
Research from Ico Partners’ Thomas Bidaux shows that in 2025, games companies raised $26 million on Kickstarter – level with 2024’s figures, and one of the more successful years since the last big Kickstarter boom in 2015.
Last year, 443 video game projects were successfully funded on Kickstarter, a minor reduction (4%) from 2024’s figures. 55 game projects raised over $100,000 in 2025, while 11 made over $500,000.
“Last time there were so many $500k-plus projects was in 2015,” Bidaux says. “There are early indicators that 2026 will be in line with the 2025 pace. Kickstarter is not funding the whole video games industry, but there are good opportunities for the projects going on the platform.”
David Harper, the MD of Skyhook Games, which recently took to Kickstarter to secure funding for Lawn Mowing Simulator 2, says that although crowdfunding has never been an easy option, there are different “background challenges” that can have an impact on a project’s success.
“Gamers can be paralysed by choice,” Harper says. “Marketing channels are flooded, curation is light, and the economy – both within the games industry and more generally – has been pretty tough.”
One big challenge facing Kickstarter projects is the barrier to entry. In the platform’s early days, companies could simply pitch an idea; Frontier’s Elite: Dangerous, for example, was very much a rough and ready work in progress when it raised over £1.5 million on Kickstarter in 2012. Now, you need to have an almost-complete game to secure funding.
“You need to have the game in a state where you can capture release-quality footage, and it is even better if you can offer a demo,” Bidaux explains. “Alongside that, you need to be quite advanced in your marketing effort. You need an audience already engaged and interested in the game. The campaign will help reach more people, but you need a starting base to make it work.
“Both of these points mean you cannot turn to Kickstarter on a whim if funds are suddenly scarce, or if you need those funds to make the project presentable.
“Crowdfunding is fundamentally a marketing and a community exercise. In an industry where funding is much more difficult to secure, getting to the point where Kickstarter becomes an option is not easy.”
Bad actors
Another challenge faced by Skyhook’s Harper is scammers on the Kickstarter platform. Twice, the project received large pledges that “looked great for the campaign”, but these accounts were removed. The second instance of this brought the Lawn Mowing Simulator 2 crowdfunding push under its target in the final 24 hours.
“We’d been ‘funded’ for over three weeks, but the size of the withdrawn pledge meant that we were suddenly back below our campaign target,” Harper explains. “Kickstarter kindly offered to extend our campaign by a week, and with support from more backers who saw our situation, we completed the campaign successfully – but the situation made it pretty tough for us to ever really feel in control of our destiny.”
Harper admits that this activity is hard for platforms to manage; after all, any additional friction designed to dissuade scammers could also prove problematic for genuine backers.
“The only real way to prevent an experience like ours is to limit the cost of the highest tiers,” Harper says. “This prevents a single removed pledge from derailing the campaign overall, but it also limits the opportunity for a genuinely kind soul to support a campaign to that degree. So you just have to balance the risk with the potential reward.”
A potentially difficult path
Crowdfunding in the games space is not without its critics. Daniel Milo, indie director at Azoove maker Timeless Toucan, took to LinkedIn earlier this year to advise studios not to attempt to fund their games in this manner.
For one, he says that a “mostly finished” game is “almost always” required for success, in addition to an “existing audience”. If you are releasing your game on Steam, Milo says that you are “punished” for selling keys via the campaign as the platform ignores “your core audience’s reviews”. That’s on top of an unsuccessful campaign potentially having a negative association that will make it harder to secure a publisher.
“There are plenty of systemic problems with crowdfunding, and due to competitiveness, many studios are forced to engage in tactics I frown upon,” Milo continues. “Due to the nature of all-or-nothing funding and the culture of ‘funded in 35 seconds’, studios are encouraged to place their target drastically below what they actually need to raise, risking a ‘funded’ game that can’t reach the release line.”
“Seek traditional funding through publishers, angels, and VCs, if you are desperate”
Milo says that those considering crowdfunding should look at alternatives. The first is the “more traditional path”.
“Seek traditional funding through publishers, angels, and VCs, if you are desperate,” he says. “If you have a game of sufficient quality and ability to create a marketing campaign that would result in a successful campaign, you have the resources to show traction and quality to the investors.”
The other option is a revenue-sharing or “sweat equity” path, where employees take little or zero salary at first, but are given a share in the eventual profits or in the company itself.
“The main upside is not relying on the crowdfunding money, and planning your scope to people’s comfort from the beginning,” Milo says.
Upfront work
The main bit of advice from nearly everyone we spoke to for this piece is simple: you need to put as much work as possible into building a community before a campaign starts. Hrvoje Horvatek, CEO and game designer at The Red Solstice and Atre: Dominance Wars developer Ironward, says that studios should set up a page on Kickstarter before launching a campaign.
“Do not launch unless you reach at least 500 followers,” he explains. “That’s the only way to ensure you will get a decent start even if all your marketing efforts end up not working as expected.”
Bidaux adds: “I usually recommend at least three months of marketing effort before the opening of your ‘Coming Soon’ page and the launch of the actual campaign. I have heard other experts recommend planning for six months.”
On the follower point, Skyhook’s Harper says that it is important to know that the accounts following you are real.
“Do not launch unless you reach at least 500 followers”
“While you can increase your campaign’s follower count before launch by paying money to specialist marketing agencies, you also risk spending money to acquire fake accounts or bots,” he says. “We chose not to use an agency for this purpose, but another campaign launched around the same time suffered significantly. Although they had more followers than we did, virtually none of those converted into backing at launch, and it was quite tough to see.”
Harper also says that you should not “underestimate” how much work building a compelling campaign page is.
“As with building your community ahead of launch, you also need to commit a lot of time to ensuring that you have a really good selection of concept art, screenshots, and gameplay videos that show off your game in the best light possible,” he explains. “Equally, you will need logos, GIFs, banners, appealing graphic design, and really well-written copy to make the campaign page pop.”
Make it pop
Crescent County from Electric Saint – which was recently picked up by Kinetic Publishing – raised nearly £95,000 on Kickstarter in 2025, more than doubling its funding goal. Electric Saint co-founder Anna Hollinrake has one big tip for would-be crowdfunders: “GIFs. Oh my god, cover your page with gameplay GIFs. Put your art front and centre. Make sure you have really punchy imagery. You want to make sure that you’ve both got some playable gameplay.”
On the subject of imagery, Hollinrake says that right now, it’s important to showcase how you are making the game and take your community behind the scenes.
“Don’t be afraid to put in working sketches and early ideas, because people love to see that, especially now in the age of AI,” she says. “People are much more excited to see your thought process. I absolutely recommend being vulnerable about it and being honest. I think being quite upfront about why you’re doing something is important. People on Kickstarter really value genuineness.”
The Electric Saint co-founder also says it’s important to know what parts of your Kickstarter campaign page you can edit after it goes live.
“We definitely messed up on not putting images in the individual rewards, and you can’t go back and update them,” she says. “Any rewards that you offer are going to be locked the minute that someone gets it. You have to be pretty careful about that, but you can always add extras on after.”
Details matter
While there’s no harm in looking at past successes on Kickstarter, Bidaux emphasises that it’s important to understand why they worked.
“It is very easy to make big mistakes by looking at past successful campaigns, and not understand what made them click with their audience,” he explains. “Some mistakes can be very costly, even if your campaign meets its goal. Not designing your rewards properly, for instance, has tripped more than one very well-funded project.”
Bidaux also points out another bit of “overlooked” advice – actually having a conversation with Kickstarter.
“Kickstarter has a dedicated Games team whose sole raison d’être is to make the creators on the platform successful,” he says. “Talk to them.”
There’s also the dark magic of deciding how to choose a funding goal. If projects don’t meet the mark, then they don’t get anything, so landing on a target is a fine line.
“It was like, what is the minimum amount of time that we need from development roles and how much can we pay?” Hollinrake says.
“What would be a fair wage – not a great wage – and what can get us to a point where we can take everything that we’ve made and string it together to make it a full experience?”
There may be fewer headline-grabbing success stories on Kickstarter now, but that’s not to say that games on the crowdfunding platform don’t have a bright future ahead of them. Bidaux says that there’s a lot of “untapped potential” for games and crowdfunding.
“With the marketing for games getting more and more challenging, this is an excellent extra beat to add to a project that can fund itself and have an amazing halo effect on your audience,” he says. “I think there are more opportunities with crowdfunding in the future for video games than ever before.”
Harper adds: “Overall, the concept of video game crowdfunding is in a good place. The challenges are still very real, but if you take your time, do your research and have a compelling project, there’s every chance of finding success. We learned a great deal during our campaign, including a lot about marketing in general. If we found ourselves in a similar situation in the future, we certainly wouldn’t rule out crowdfunding again.”