Last year was a good year for games on Kickstarter PBC, with video game campaigns raising over $46 million through the crowdfunding platform in 2015, more than double what they had raised the previous year. However, according to Thomas Bidaux, co-founder and CEO of video game market intelligence firm Ico Partners, those numbers are somewhat misleading.

While the overall funds raised for video game projects on Kickstarter were higher in 2015 than they were in 2014, the total number of projects that were actually fully funded was lower.

In an article posted to Gamasutra, Bidaux explained that there were 373 successfully funded video game projects on Kickstarter in 2015, down from 421 the previous year. This number is even more surprising given the fact that the overall number of video game crowdfunding campaigns went up by over 100, meaning that the ratio of successful to unsuccessful campaigns also went down.

Despite the drop in the number of successful campaigns, the amount raised was actually much higher, and Bidaux explained that “it is clear the good performance was driven by large projects.” For example, the campaign for Yooka-Laylee (pictured above) raised over $3.3 million alone.

Image courtesy of Ico Partners

Bidaux noted that this trend is not new, and in fact, the total number of successful video game campaigns in 2014 had also been lower than the previous year.

“This is the 2nd year in a row that we see fewer projects being funded on Kickstarter,” Bidaux said. “There is no sharp drop, so this [could] well be the system being refined and the communities being more demanding in terms of quality before funding projects.”

While the total number of funded video game campaigns dropped slightly, Bidaux pointed out that lower tier campaigns, which set out to raise less than $10,000, have been steadily increasing over the last few years.

“There are more projects than ever trying their hand at getting funded on the platform,” Bidaux said. “I suspect the quality bar to get funded is just getting higher. For most projects, it now necessary to have a demo of the game already available and the ability to show a rather advanced stage of the development process, much more so than in 2013.”

You can read Bidaux’s full article on Gamasutra.

Image credit: Playtonic Games