While some high-profile success stories are giving people hope, let's not pretend that everything is OK with every game funded on Kickstarter. Because it's not.
UnSub has for a few years now been tracking the progress of successful Kickstarter video game campaigns (only those that actually hit their funding target).
This latest version of the study looks at every Kickstarter video game that had promised to be out by January 2014, and sees whether it made its target date or not.
While the number of successfully-funded games is increasing - from 5 in 2009 to 207 in 2012 - the percentage of those games actually finding their way into people's hands on time and in their full and promised state remains fairly constant.
Smoothing the figures out over the space of four years, "the data indicates that only around 1 in 3 have fully delivered their promised title to their backers".
Things get a little better when you allow for partial delivery - games that have delivered a first episode, an early alpha build, etc - but not by much. UnSub says that when this concession is taken into account "then about 1 out of 2 projects have delivered something video game-ish for their support. Which leaves the other half of projects with backers that are still waiting."
That's insane. When Kickstarter first blew up a few years back, it was seen as a means for people to get games made outside the traditional publisher system. It was a way to let anyone make a game, so long as their idea was a popular one.
The reality, as these figures show, is a little more sobering. While high-profile games continue to be released, and are turning out pretty great, those are often from veteran developers with established studios and experience in making video games.
The other side of the Kickstarter equation - inexperienced gamers with big ideas - are obviously finding that making a video game is a lot harder than they thought when they first put together a budget, posted some concept art and asked for your money.
UnSub's research doesn't accuse people of taking money and running, or of projects vanishing into vapourware. If anything, it's just showing that when people who have never made a video game before start promising release dates, you might want to take them with a grain of salt. Maybe get ready to wait years, not months.
You can read the full report below, and if you're up to it, you can comb through the data here.
Kickstander: Only Around A Third of Kickstarted Video Game Projects Fully Deliver To Their Backers [evilasahobby]