Kickstarter
Perhaps the greatest example of the popularity of video games is Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a site for people with ideas that they would like to see in real life but don't have enough money. The site allows those people to post their idea and for other people to crowd fund it. What is crowd funding? Basically its when lots of people fund a project with small donations. For example, each person donates about $5, but there are 30000 donors, which makes it about $150,000! This way of funding is a good way to judge the amount of people that actually would pay for your product. Kickstarter first mainly had funding for music, food, and health, but gaming has grown to the 2nd most funded section on Kickstarter in the last year, earning more than 50 million dollars.Also, the most funded video game on Kickstarter,Project Eternity, just finished, raising almost $4,000,000 dollars from about 74,000 sponsors.It also seems that the average gamer seems willing to pay more too. The average donation for Project Eternity was around $50, more than the game costs itself. In 2011, the video game industry was worth about 105 billion dollars, a huge difference from 2001, when it was 49 billion.