How Bloodstained and Yooka-Laylee are helping smaller Kickstarters just by existing

Earlier in the week we ran a story about the negative impact huge, well-known games and creators are having on Kickstarter when it comes to helping people understand the true cost of making a game. The question of budgets and external funding is a tricky one, but its also worth pointing out that these huge projects also help the ecosystem by bringing in new users.

Bloodstained is a spiritual successor to the Castlevania series, while Yooka-Laylee is a modern update of the Banjo-Kazooie formula. Both games are being developed by the creative leads of the original games, and both have found massive, multi-million dollar success on Kickstarter.

"Useful stats: 22% of Bloodstained backers and 39% of Yooka backers have never backed a project before," Kickstarter's David Gallagher said via Twitter, responding to our original story. "High-profile projects like these expose people to what is still a very new way of making games."

That's great news, but a bigger question is whether those new backers will move onto other projects, helping other games to find funding and grow. Gallagher had that stat on hand as well.

"7% of those 27,360 new backers have already backed another project — maybe even Katie Chironis' very fine one?" he responded.

That means 93 percent of backers haven't backed a second project, but they're also new users; getting that many new people into the ecosystem is good news for everyone, and it's impossible to know how many of those folks will eventually back many projects.

While some projects may not strictly need Kickstarter for funding, and again the question of players learning what's realistic in a budget is complicated, the fact remains that these big, superstar projects draw new backers to Kickstarter.

"The Veronica Mars and Zach Braff projects have brought tens of thousands of new people to Kickstarter. 63% of those people had never backed a project before," a Kickstarter blog post stated back in 2013. "Thousands of them have since gone on to back other projects, with more than $400,000 pledged to 2,200 projects so far. Nearly 40% of that has gone to other film projects."