Tomás Pereira Machado

Crowdfunding is a collective financing technique, which is gaining notoriety in the last years by allowing people to pool their resources towards supporting initiatives without needing financial intermediaries. This technique had great impact on gaming industry, allowing projects which mainstream developers had no interest on funding. Crowdfunding and gaming industry’s evolution bear similarities on their intimate relation to technology, which had great impact in these processes. More than a funding technique, crowdfunding serves as a community, gathering people with common interests aiming, beside financial gains, the realization of new ideas, as well as sharing experiences and collaborating on other users’ creative processes. In this context, it is fitting to investigate what variables are associated to a fundraising’s success, which represents a contribution to literature, in order to increase the small number of studies regarding crowdfunding on gaming and because of the early stage of crowdfunding studies in general. This study’s goal is evaluating crowdfunding’s selection process for the gaming sector in the platform Kickstarter between 2013 and 2017, investigating factors that guide founders towards allocating their resources in some projects instead of others. This investigation is based on qualitative and quantitative variables, extracted from Kickstarter’s campaign pages by the researcher’s individual evaluation, making the hypothesis test through a logistic regression. Among results, variables that indicate larger information supply, quality and readiness from the founder tends towards a successful campaign. Noticeably, variables that indicate good communication between founder and backers, information about the development process, having renowned supporters or strong brands, and the creation of a visual identity, were decisive for the success or failure of the fundraising campaigns, while specific information or samples from the game had ambiguous or inconclusive effect.