Kickstarter has brought £100 million to UK projects, with games and technology dominating

Kickstarter, Indiegogo and other crowdfunding platforms have really changed how new businesses and ideas come to market. If it wasn’t for the crowdfunding revolution, the indie games industry wouldn’t be anywhere near as healthy as it currently is, and the tech startup market wouldn’t have the same potential it does right now.

To help us realise just how much of a contribution these platforms actually have to society, Kickstarter today announced that, since its introduction into the UK marketplace in 2012 with the Picade project, it has fed £100 million into UK projects. That means of the 8,181 successfully funded UK-made projects, Kickstarter has funnelled around £25 million a year to their creation. While that average pledge may only be £53.80, if it wasn’t for the Brits backing these projects, they may never have seen the light of day had Kickstarter not existed.

Interestingly, the biggest category driving Kickstarter’s UK funding over the last four years has been games. While us Brits may be trying to bring cats to the London Underground, get Ai Weiwei’s Tree sculptures into London’s Royal Academy and see the start of a modular smartwatch, it appears we’re most interested in bringing games and game-related projects to life.

Not only was the most successful UK project a board game adaptation of Dark Souls – gathering 31,178 backers and a total pledge of £3.7 million – but the games category as a whole drummed up £26 million in pledged funds. Two notable titles in this category are Team17’s upcoming Yooka-Laylee and Frontier Development’s Elite Dangerous.

Technology projects come a close second with £22 million reaching the UK tech industry across 272,941 pledges.

While a lot of UK projects will have also seen funding from around the world, it’s good to know that nearly 750,000 Brits pledged support for British ideas. In fact, while the US was – unsurprisingly – the next largest backer of British projects, just 495,000 Americans decided they wanted to fund UK creativity.

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