Crowdfunding as a Means to Attract Investments in the Video Game Industry

This Master’s thesis is titled “Application of crowdfunding as a tool to attract investments in the videogame industry” The length is 83 pages. Keywords: crowdfunding, motivation, videogames, community, engagement, co-creation. Rapid advances in technology affect all everybody, including business. Low entry barriers allow everyone to attempt at source the necessary funds via the means of crowdfunding, albeit not all succeed in such endeavours. The research objective is to analyse the outcomes of the crowdfunding campaigns for the videogame projects with the help of a regression model. The research object are the crowdfunding platforms, and Kickstarter in particular; the research subject are the videogame developers. Upon the literary review we had established that the majority of studies covers only the basic principles of the. The academic novelty of the study is posed by the fact that we consider crowdfunding in the videogame industry not only as a mode of financing but also as a promotion tool. Chapter 1, “Theoretical aspects of crowdfunding,” describes main aspects of the cowdfunding operations, alongside the role played by the elements of co-creation. Chapter 2, “Crowdfunding as a marketing tool,” describes usage of crowdfunding for the purposes of projects’ promotion and external investors attraction. Chapter 3, “Building the model of the relationship between the effect of contribution and the company’s characteristics,” shows the conducted regression analysis allowing to highlight the most influential factors. The model was built based on 92 Kickstarter. Based on the resulted model we have established a positive correlation between the number of prospective awards, Facebook presence, the promotion on the website’s behalf and the average size of user donation. Thereby we concluded that crowdfunding is more likely to serve as a facilitating tool, diversifying developers’ portfolio, rather than the prime source of financing.