Ukie welcomes Kickstarter UK launch as great opportunity for the games industry

Games and interactive entertainment trade body, Ukie, says the launch of Kickstarter in the UK is a fantastic opportunity for games businesses to raise funds through crowdfunding. Ukie has been promoting crowdfunding as a viable way for games businesses to raise finance and published a report in February this year with Osbourne Clarke to recommend how different models, especially equity based ones, could be better encouraged in the UK.

Ukie CEO, Dr Jo Twist said. “Crowdfunding gives games businesses a fantastic way of raising money for their ideas. Crowdfunding is also a fantastic way to generate metrics to not only understand the appetite for their idea but to generate interest from other investors. The games industry has raised more money on the US version of Kickstarter than any other content category this year, prompting them to call 2012 Year of the Game, and its launch in the UK is only to be welcomed as it will make it even easier for games businesses based in this country to make use of the platform.

“Having Kickstarter in the UK will also raise the profile of crowdfunding more generally. There are already lots of other UK based crowdfunding platforms operating and government should recognise them as a sector and update financial regulation around equity based crowdfunding that will let the platform operators operate as efficiently as possible in the UK and make the regulation fighting-fit for a growing digital economy.”

Many Ukie members have used crowdfunding to raise money to produce their games, including Revolutions Software’s latest Broken Sword and Six To Start, with their iOS hit Zombies Run. Six To Start CEO, Adrian Hon said: “Games and crowdfunding are the perfect match. We used the US version of Kickstarter to generate the money that we needed to create Zombies Run in the first place, but we had to jump through various hoops to get our project on to an American funding platform. Having Kickstarter launch in the UK will allow British businesses much easier access to its donations based crowdfunding platform’.