❓ Problem

Gaming is the biggest entertainment business on earth, and it isn't close. The global games market closed 2025 at $201.6 billion, crossing the $200 billion line for the first time, with 3.6 billion players worldwide. That is bigger than the global box office and recorded music combined, with plenty of room to spare.

Now look at how games actually get funded. Video game projects on Kickstarter raised about $26 million in 2025across 443 successful campaigns, its second-best year on record. Sounds healthy until you frame it: as ICO Partners' Thomas Bidaux puts it, 400-plus funded games a year is roughly two weeks of Steam releases. In its entire 17-year history the category has raised about $377 million across 5,526 campaigns. Against a $200 billion industry, the funding rail for games is a rounding error on a rounding error.

Here is why it never scaled. A game used to take a studio and years, so a $70k raise couldn't deliver a finished product, only a trailer and a Discord server. Backers got burned by delays and no-shows (Star Citizen has now vacuumed up roughly $900 million and still isn't out), so trust curdled. Meanwhile publishers sit on thousands of dormant back-catalogue titles earning exactly $0, and a founder who just sold his company for $80m is out here proposing a GoFundMe to get a 1999 RTS running on his MacBook. The demand is deafening. The rails are broken. Here's the idea.

✅ Solution

Game of Loans: a crowdfunding platform built only for games, where you fund a new indie title, revive a dead classic, or bring an old favourite to a new platform, with the licence cleared with the IP owner before a single dollar is pledged.

• Licence-first, always. Unlike a generic Kickstarter, no campaign for existing IP goes live until the rights holder has signed off. That kills the single biggest reason games crowdfunding blows up: legal limbo and cease-and-desists mid-raise.
• Milestone-gated money. Funds release in tranches as builds actually ship (playable demo to beta to launch), with backers voting to unlock each tranche. You're funding a game, not a promise. No delivery, no money out of escrow.
• Demand pages turn fans into a term sheet. Anyone can spin up a page ("AoE2 native on Mac: 12,000 pledges, $410k committed") that converts raw fan demand into a pre-packaged licensing offer a publisher can accept with one signature. Pure found money for IP owners who are currently earning nothing from that catalogue.

The wedge is narrow on purpose: prove one beloved dead game can be revived because the fans literally pre-paid for it. The platform underneath (escrow, milestone voting, licensing facilitation) then expands across the whole funding side of the industry.

📊 Key Numbers

Market size

• The games industry is a $201.6 billion backdrop, but the addressable slice is new-title development funding plus back-catalogue revival and porting. That is the TAM this platform actually plays in.
• Today's games-crowdfunding category is tiny and stuck: about $26 million a year in GMV on Kickstarter. That is the floor, not the ceiling, and it is the exact thing this idea exists to grow.
• The overlooked prize is the back catalogue. Publishers hold thousands of titles at $0 revenue. Turn even a few hundred of those into fan-funded remasters and ports a year at $200k to $2m each, and you have a category several multiples larger than today's entire games-crowdfunding market.

ARR potential

• Platform economics on crowdfunding are thin (Kickstarter takes ~5% plus payment fees), so the thesis is expanding the pie, not skimming $26m. Grow games-crowdfunding GMV 10x to ~$260m (still a rounding error against $200bn) and a blended ~8-10% take across platform fee, payment, milestone escrow servicing and licensing facilitation is ~$20-26m in revenue.
• Layer a per-deal licensing facilitation fee every time a demand page converts into a signed revival, and a small ongoing rev-share on revived titles, and there's a clean path to $15-30m ARR as a focused funding platform.
• The ceiling is much higher if it becomes the default place millions of new AI-native developers go to get funded. Own the rail, own the category.

⏰ Why Now