Kickstarter revealed an interesting statistic this week — seven of the 11 projects that have managed to raise $1 million through the crowdfunding website so far this year are games or game-related projects.
But that's only the beginning. Kickstarter officials say that, in 2012, more dollars have been pledged to game projects than to any other category (besting categories such as film, music and technology to name a few). In fact, this year the games category has gone from the eighth most-funded category to the second most-funded.
The gaming category is doing so well on Kickstarter, which first launched in 2009, the site has officially declared it "The Year of the Game."
This year alone, games projects — which range from the Ouya game machine to Neal Stephenson's sword-fighting game "Clang" to the GaymerCon convention — pulled in more than $50 million in funding — a rather enormous increase from the $3.6 million they pulled in last year.
Kickstarter credits the Double Fine Adventure game project from famed designer Tim Schafer (creator of the likes of "Pyschonauts" and "The Secret of Monkey Island") for kicking the game category into high gear. In February, Double Fine raised more than $3.3 million to create a brand new, old-school adventure game without the need for a meddling publisher.
"Double Fine signaled to game developers that they could use Kickstarter to do something that previously seemed impossible: make the game they wanted without outside interference," Kickstarter officials explained in their blog post. "You can see Double Fine's impact by the jump in the number of game projects launching each month beginning in February." Check out the graphic right here:
Meanwhile, those who fund gaming projects turn out to be an especially generous lot. Kickstarter says those who first back a games project have backed an average of 2.43 projects compared to 1.78 projects for all other backers.
Have you funded a game project on Kickstarter? If so, which one and why? Let us know in the comments.
Winda Benedetti writes about video games for NBC News. You can follow her tweets about games and other things on Twitter here @WindaBenedetti, and you can follow her on Google+. Meanwhile, be sure to check out the IN-GAME FACEBOOK PAGE to discuss the day's gaming news and reviews.