Crowdfund Bookie, January 2014: 63 percent nosedive

The Crowdfund Bookie crunches data from select successful Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns that ended during the month and produces pretty charts for you to look at.

Any momentum maintained in the video game crowdfunding space in December 2013 was dashed just one month later. Gaming projects for the month totaled only $845,876, a 63.71 percent decrease from December's $2,331,061. Just 20 projects were funded during a five-week January period, half the amount that were successful in December. The number of backers for projects also saw a 79.58 percent downturn, plummeting to 12,712 funders.

Unlike previous months, there wasn't a marquee project to prop the crowdfunding arena's totals up, as the top earner was Taitale Studios' 4X strategy game Novus Aeterno, which hauled in $268,875. Another game stole our attention for the month: MMA Federation. Much like the infamously suspicious funding patterns of Gridiron Thunder, the MMA-focused mobile social game managed to earn $163,924 thanks to only 159 backers, an outlandish average of $1,030.97 per funder.

As expected, the odd funding averages of MMA Federation significantly impacted the end results for January, as removing the game's data for the month drops the mean average pledge per backer amount from $66.54 to $54.33. Without MMA Federation's sales data, January's projects also added up to 281.3 percent of their funding goals. Both impacted data points show that January's projects still stayed consistent with the funding trends seen in our past Bookies; pledges average out to roughly $50 and backers tend to push projects well past their goal amounts.

Head past the break to see the month's top five projects and a breakdown by genre.

1. Novus Aeterno by Taitale Studios - $268,875

2. The Repopulation by Above and Beyond - $176,525

3. MMA Federation by Mixed Martial Mobile - $163,924

4. Sunrider by Love in Space - $44,039

5. War of Omens by Fifth Column Games - $32,335

Action (4): $45,654 (203.93%) by 1,479 people ($30.87 mean average)
Adventure (3): $21,188 (152.06%) by 541 people ($39.16 mean average)
Platformer (2): $22,378 (172.14%) by 910 people ($24.59 mean average)
RPG (3): $233,622 (381.97%) by 3,689 people ($63.33 mean average)
Simulation (2): $169,238 (103.40%) by 404 people ($418.91 mean average)
Strategy (6): $353,796 (269.05%) by 5,689 people ($62.19 mean average)

[Image: Taitale Studios]