For obvious reasons, the coronavirus pandemic has, and will very likely continue to impact businesses in ways that will become increasingly apparent after time has passed and the ongoing pandemic period's economic impact can be properly assessed. A routine midyear report compiled for Kickstarter has shed some light on how the pandemic affected the variety of projects it has hosted, due to the inevitability of discussing the coronavirus's economic effects on any sort of business that includes data from this year. While many metrics are lower when compared to past years, one category that managed to buck this trend is gaming.
Overall, the report notes, the number of new projects started on Kickstarter has fallen significantly from previous years. As far as the percentage of projects that are able to meet their funding goals, that number rose significantly in February of 2020 before dropping by an even greater factor than it had risen by April. That said, June 2020's percentage of projects that received funding is 14% behind June of last year, which indicates that the impact of coronavirus has been considerable but not severe.
Music and film projects on Kickstarter, however, have been impacted severely, which the report theorizes is due to the inability of filmmakers and musicians to collaborate without breaking quarantine guidelines. Gaming, of course, runs into no such obstacle.
Tabletop gaming, in particular, did see a drop off in the total number of projects launched in line with the average across all of Kickstarter for the beginning of this year, while the percentage of projects meeting their goals remains comparable to previous years. However, one sole project, Frosthaven, managed to raise more money than all of the other tabletop gaming campaigns on Kickstarter in the month of April combined, meaning that an otherwise-impacted May (when the project concluded) managed to become the month in which the most amount of money has been raised for tabletop gaming in Kickstarter history.
Video games too saw a comparable decline in the overall number of projects and stability in the percentage of campaigns managing to meet their funding goals. In March of this year, The Wonderful 101: Remastered and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous both secured more than 2 million dollars each in funding, meaning that March especially was a better month for video games than other project categories.
Gaming will forever be inextricably linked to entertainment during the pandemic, if only due to the ubiquity of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and unending discourse around The Last of Us: Part II. This new report now further demonstrates that gaming has remained popular, even when compared to music, film, and other media, during our current, weird historical moment.
Source: Thomas Bidaux & ICO on Medium