What worked for video game crowdfunding in 2025?
And what lessons can we learn? Also: most-watched Jan. games & lots of discovery news.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
We’re back, and we hope everyone enjoyed the superb owl on Sunday. (We thought it was above average, but not quite superb.) Anyhow, we have things to discuss this week - starting with a close look at how Kickstarter works for video games in 2025/2026.
Before we start, do you know Garry’s Mod has a Steam achievement you only get if you’re on the same server as creator (also of Rust, S&box) Garry Newman? Since he’s re-appeared on the app a coupla times recently, completionist fans set up a Discord to monitor his Steam rich presence, so they can swarm a server if he joins. (*sigh*)
[FREE DEMO OF GDCo PRO? You too can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by contacting us today - ~90 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game discovery news: Poker Night, Wardogs shine
And here’s some of the latest platform and discovery news, which goes a little something like this:
The latest unreleased trending Steam games, according to GameDiscoverCo Pro’s 7-day wishlist charts (Feb 2nd - 9th) sees surprise Telltale multiplayer remake Poker Night At The Inventory (ft. The Heavy from TF2, Max & Strongbad!) hitting #1, as 100 player tactical military sandbox FPS Wardogs (#2) also makes a splash.
Elsewhere, co-op physics-stealth game We Are So Cooked (hide the body!) also has a strong start at #4, and Guerrilla’s multiplayer franchise continuation Horizon Hunters Gathering (#5) is also hotly awaited by players. Also notable: a strong surge for cat-heavy tactical RPG Mewgenics (#6), out today and looking huuuge.
A useful new change from Steam for Early Access games? “We recently introduced a new field in Steamworks… providing a dedicated space to display the date when a game plans to exit Early Access and officially launch 1.0… developers have the option to share a specific calendar date, or a more vague timeframe if they wish.” Handy.
Roblox’s latest financials were again impressive, with yearly revenue of $4.9 billion, up 36% year on year (Booking were up 55% to $6.8b.) Elsewhere: “DAUs were up 69% year-on-year to 144 million, with hours engaged increasing 88% to 35 billion.” 36.7m monthly payers spend an average of $20.18 each month - nice.
Regional issues for PC game platforms? Turkey’s “Family and Social Services Ministry, as part of wider legislation aimed at restricting child social media access, has drafted legislation that would impose restrictions and intensive oversight on Steam, Epic, and other digital gaming platforms.” (Turkey is ~1.35% of Steam players, per GDCo.)
Microlinks: Discord is adding adult verification features (via facial age estimation or official ID), tho all users will be presumed teen as default; there’s a PlayStation State Of Play on Thurs 11th for “third-party and indie games”; Sony-owned anime platform Crunchyroll is developing original sub-included anime-friendly games.
January 2026’s top regional PlayStation downloads, according to Sony itself, shows ARC Raiders at #1 (U.S.) and #2 to EA Sports FC 26 (Europe) on PlayStation 5, with Red Dead Redemption 2 topping the PS4 game charts* (*also playable on PS5, of course!), and Fortnite & Roblox atop the F2P download charts, yet again.
We never got around to a ‘why was ARC Raiders a megahit?’ newsletter, but this great interview with Embark’s Patrick Söderlund has a lot of hints: “When you build a game, and you structure it to a large extent with elements of a [mixed PvE & PVP] sandbox, the stuff that happens in Arc Raiders is just the output, which is incredible…”
An interesting claim we missed from Epic Games Store’s 2025 round-up: “In 2025, players claimed 662 million titles through the program… This delivered a measurable halo effect across the broader PC ecosystem, including a 40% lift in Steam CCU while the title was free on the Epic Games Store.”
An spicy opinion from the Mewgenics devs about Early Access? “‘We are launching a complete game. That is a weird thing now,’ Tyler Glaiel told The Escapist. ‘I’m really not a fan of Early Access,’ Edmund McMillen added. ‘I feel like it originated from people needing money fast. I’m not shitting on people who do Early Access, but it feels strange to change the experience after people have already finished it.’”
Xbox things: The Verge details 2026 plans, inc. an “Automatic Super Resolution feature, which uses an NPU to upscale games” for Xbox Ally X & an improved Xbox PC UI; Windows Central looks into the next Xbox hardware, suggesting “the Gen-10 Xbox ‘PC’ will also run all of your current Xbox games, in addition to games from Windows 11 PC stores like Steam.”
What worked for games on Kickstarter in 2025?
Crowdfunding can be a bit of an enigma at times when it comes to video games. Why? a) an early craze, with Koji Igarashi’s Bloodstained raising $5.5m from 65k pledgers in 2015, came down to earth, b) board games have become the dominant crowdfunding medium & c) platforms like Kickstarter haven’t always made data access transparent.
But ICO’s Thomas Bidaux is close to Kickstarter, and has managed to get a full 17-year set of data from the platform for a new blog post he’s made. And the results are pretty interesting, with both 2024 and 2025 seeing ~$26 million raised for games on KS.
These two years have been the highest since 2015. But - we need context! Sadly, we weren’t able to get the % of failed campaigns compared to successes. But here’s the # of campaigns that made up that $26m, with multi-year trending, via Thomas:
So basically, comparing the post-2015 baseline with now:
2016 had 407 successful video game Kickstarter campaigns and $16m paid out, for an average of $39,000 pledged.
And 2025 had 443 successful campaigns and $26m paid out, for a per-campaign average of $58,000.
That’s roughly a 7% increase in total pledged every year, albeit with a fairly flat number of successful campaigns (up ~1.5% per year, if we compare exact years.) And besides one-offs like Star Citizen ($900m pledged! really!), there’s not really another platform out there besides Kickstarter nowadays with significant scale.
Rather than just copy-pasting Thomas’ excellent blog post, we got a chance to ask him a few questions about the state of crowdfunding (since his team was involved in 3 of the games that grossed >$500k on Kickstarter in 2025!) Some top-level notes:
You can crowdfund later in your product’s development life: the days of only crowdfunding to start development are over, and Thomas pointed to Prelude Dark Pain, a “dark fantasy tactical RPG” that raised $157k on a $47k goal, noting “a lot of the attention the campaign received was via content creators and media that had exclusive access to a demo version.” (Having a demo? A big boon!)
Pre-promoting your Kickstarter via ‘follows’ got way more important: Thomas notes: “Kickstarter has been improving its pre-campaign tools in the past year, and the practice of a launching a Coming Soon page is more and more common”, with Autonomica launching with >10,000 KS followers - and ending with >12k backers.
Paid marketing is a great way to take your campaign ‘over the top’: because of the large average pledge amounts, sometimes >$100 per backer, there are various paid ad options - including some Facebook agencies - to “easily track attribution” for positive ROI. But Thomas reminds us it can “only complement what is the cornerstone of crowdfunding, which is community building.”
Thomas also provided us all 2025 Kickstarters that hit >$500k: Elestrals Awakened ($1.4m); Autonomica ($1m); Animation VERSUS ($1m); Starfinder: Afterlight ($937k); Ahoy ($860k); STARS REACH ($817k); POSTAL 2 Redux Founder’s Edition ($645k); The Sinking City 2 ($607k); DungeonBox - A D&D Party Game ($594k); Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori ($560k); Diesel Knights (USD $526k).
What is notable about these games? The diversity of genres & styles! It’s almost as if they all have their own communities & are using Kickstarter simply as a platform, huh? Thomas adds: “The style of games is quite varied both in terms of genres (sandbox MMO; mech-FPS; CRPG) and settings (sci-fi; steampunk; Lovecraftian).”
Thomas also chatted to us about other examples of interesting Kickstarters, such as “cozy crafting roguelike” Teamcrafter (€85k raised), which was made by a team that created a Final Fantasy XIV crafting tool, and pivoted that “qualified audience of craft-loving gamers” into backing their standalone game. Clever.
Also notable: The Witch’s Bakery from 2024 (€315k raised from 7.3k backers), where you “live a magical life as a witch-baker in Paris”, and Thomas suggests the team’s “ability to connect with the right zeigeist on social media in general, and on Twitter in particular” helped them thrive. (He also notes cozy titles often do well on KS, partly because cross-promotion with other cozy crowdfunders helps spread the word.)
To end, I asked Thomas about the historical skepticism from some players over crowdfunding games, due to high-profile delayed (or non-shipping!) campaigns. He correctly noted that most successful Kickstarters nowadays ‘appear’ more substantial:
“The further away that moment is from the launch of the game, the more it might evolve from the promises of the campaign… that uncertainty doesn’t sit well with everyone. And we do see that even in the core fans of a project, there are some that just prefer to wait for the full release and skip the Kickstarter altogether.” So - the more solid your plans, the better?
Most-viewed games of Jan: WoW, Hytale surge…
Livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet is back, grabbing us the Top 100 most-streamed games for January 2026, analyzing the big (non-China) game video streaming platforms like Twitch & a host of other medium/small platforms.
Here’s the full list of the Top 100 (Google Drive link) with GDCo annotations. And Stream Hatchet’s Mark Rowland worked with us to analyze what happened this time:
eSports led to some of the biggest boosts among the oft-static Top 10: League of Legends (#1, 171m hours watched) jumped over 50% thanks to LCK Cup 2026, and fellow MOBA Mobile Legends: Bang Bang’s M7 world champs vaulted it to #4 with 87.4m hours watched (over 3x increase from December!)
ARC Raiders, World Of Warcraft & Valorant also excelled: extraction shooter ARC Raiders hanging out at #3 (90m hours) is seriously impressive, classic MMO WoW (#7) surged 56% to 67m hours watched thx to Beta streams for the Midnight expansion, (And another tournament helped Valorant boost to #8).
Hytale & Arknight: Endfield were the standout new Jan. releases: off-Steam Minecraft-ish PC release Hytale hit #22 with 18.3m hours watched, even in early release form. And mobile/PC ARPG gacha title Arknights: Endfield debuted at #29, with 10.9m hours watched.
Otherwise, some other notable entries for January for live-streaming watchers include F2P launch Highguard (#58, 4.7m hours watched) and a big increase for Cult Of The Lamb (#67, 3.3m hours watched), which was due to the release of its Woolhaven DLC.
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]
Love the "Superb Owl" reference. 👏