With news that revenues from games-related crowdfunding campaigns is reducing, developer Square Enix is encouraging independents to use the likes of Kickstarter and Indiegogo to use the sites to see their game become a reality.

A report by market intelligence agency ICO Partners said 446 Kickstarter projects in the gaming category were funded in 2013, but this has shrunk to just 175 in 2014 so far and it doesn’t look as though momentum is increasing, either.

Furthermore, the amount raised has reduced too. Kickstarter games raised $58m (£36m) in 2013, but only $13.5m (£8.4m) has been raised in the first half of this year.

ICO Partners CEO Thomas Bidaux said: “If 2014’s second half is comparable (something that is not easy considering you need a similar number of big hits), 2014 would be less than half of what 2013 has been… A sobering consideration.”

However, Square Enix is one company that is trying to turn this around and is encouraging independent developers to use crowdfunding platforms to fund their next blockbuster game.

Phil Elliott, the head of community at Square Enix Europe decided to take crowdfunding one step further by introducing the Square Enix Collective that invites budding developers to present their ideas to bigwigs at the company who then provide feedback about the creations and helps them come up with a game plan to raise as much capital as possible from crowdfunding.

To date, the Square Enix Collective has seen 40 projects from around 16 countries go through its process and two of these have gone on to promote their wares on crowdfunding sites.

The company makes a five percent commission on all the projects that raise money through crowdfunding, but the company’s motives are also to discover new talent in the developer world.

Elliot told Venture Beat: “We look at the feedback phase as kind of a practice run for when they do go on to crowdfunding. We want to help them learn as much as possible in that time.”

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Looking for a crowdfunding project to put some cash into? There’s an app for that, as Indiegogo launches its own for the iPhone.

Reaching the crowdfunding crowd

While Kickstarter introduced its own iPhone app some time ago, Indiegogo’s introduction arguably suggests the importance of mobile services within the emerging digital democracy of crowdfunding, after all — potential investors and projects need to be able to reach each other no matter where they happen to be. That’s something the crowdfunding services seem to recognise.

Indiegogo CEO, Slave Rubin told TechCrunch that if the company were launching today it would be a mobile-first company.

“Having a mobile presence like this will allow for an even more localized and personalized experience, which will take away even more friction,” he said.

What it does

The new app has tools for supporting and managing campaigns on the service:

Supporting Indiegogo campaigns

• Discovering new campaigns through recommendations based on past activity and preferred categories
• Exploring and following campaign categories
• Claiming campaign perks
• Sharing favorite campaigns with friends

Managing Indiegogo campaigns

• Receiving notifications each time a contribution is made to a campaign
• Monitoring campaign comments
• Posting campaign updates and photos
• Thanking contributors
• Sending custom messages to phone contacts and Facebook friends
• Promoting campaigns on social networks

It doesn’t stop there—campaign creators will soon be able to publish an Indiegogo campaign using their phone.

The best mobile experience?

“Since day one we have been dedicated to providing our campaigners and contributors with the best funding platform in the world,” said Rubin. “This year has been one of tremendous growth for us and we’re investing heavily to continue improving Indiegogo for mobile users globally. The Indiegogo App is the first of many advancements focused on delivering the best mobile experience imaginable.”

Is the app available for the iPad? Not quite, the company states:

“We love tablets! Optimizing the Indiegogo app for iPad is one of our priorities, and we’ll make an announcement as soon as we have news to share.”

Perhaps reflecting the fragmentation of the platform, neither Kickstarter nor Indiegogo offer an app for Android just yet. However the Indiegogo promises this to be “on the radar” for release later this year — watch this space.

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London may be the UK hub, but this doesn’t mean business ideas and acumen don’t exist outside the capital. Crowdfunding service Indiegogo’s Anastasia Emmanuel has a vision to switch the UK on to its own potential.

Innovation everywhere

“Great Britain is a nation of innovation but Britons are being stifled by a lack of available finance. Through the power of Indiegogo, we want to see kitchen table businesses thrive, nurture new inventions, support amazing causes and stimulate Britons to fulfil their entrepreneurial ambitions and creative dreams,” she says.

Emmanuel took a moment to chat with CrowdfundInsider to elaborate on her plan to enable UK business inside and outside the capital. Entrepreneurs outside London have a much tougher time finding and getting their ideas financed because venture capitalists and angel investors are so often London-based and London-focused, she observed.

That’s a situation that distorts the nature of business success in this country.

‘More than London’ says Indiegogo

“We believe that lack of crowdfunding successes outside London, isn’t because of a lack of innovation or creative talent, but, a lack of awareness of crowdfunding as a viable alternative to traditional finance, be it bank loans, investment or grants,” she said. “London is it’s own bubble and we have amazing success stories every week on Indiegogo, distributing millions of pounds.”

In pursuit of the mission to make those outside London more aware of the potential of crowdfunding services, Indiegogo recently sent its roadshow to several cities across the UK. This will be the first of many such attempts as the service attempts to help stimulate business outside the capital, said Emmanuel.

Taking a slice

Investors take note — while it remains true that reward-based crowdfunding services such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo don’t yet offer a true return on any investment (beyond the chance to get to know innovators with good ideas) Indiegogo does plan to introduce an equity crowdfunding  platform in future.

Image c/o: Harshil Shah

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When you’re about to invest in a company you ask questions; you check balance sheets; you engage in due diligence, discovery and check criminal records. You meet the team. All these things are as true for investors using crowdfunding services as it ever has been, but author Dan Marom thinks these services make it even easier to make good investment decisions.

Crowdfunding wisdom

“I think crowdfunding is a crucial toolkit for an entrepreneur,” Marom, who wrote The Crowdfunding Revolution tells the Irish Times. “It’s the democratisation of entrepreneurship.”

Kickstarter isn’t the only crowdfunding site in town, he explains, there’s peer-to-peer lending, equity, donation and reward-based funding services — many of which are included within our directory of services.

While reward-based crowdfunding can be characterised as little more than buying a product in advance, equity-based crowdfunding means much more:

“It’s very popular to say it will destroy conventional venture fundraising, but my personal view is that the future lies in a synergy,” he says.

Can’t fool all the people all the time

You see, the advantage of pointing the crowd at business ideas is that it means those ideas come under far more oversight than any individual investor can possible deliver. You have a crowd of experts taking a look, rather than just the limited number that may exist inside your investment company.

“Sometimes it’s wiser to have the crowd do due diligence,” Marom notes, and while the crowd may not have complete expertise in the business it is being asked to look at, it’s a start. “It’s not easy to fool the crowd, but it could happen,” he says.

The potential positive impact of crowd-based decision making concerning new business ventures is one thing, but there’s another consideration that should please investors: In most cases the business itself has been vetted by the crowdfunding service.

Watch the line

Savvy investors already understand this, of course, which is why so many funding rounds fall around the 30 percent to 40 percent funding mark — usually around the line at which a founder’s personally aquired funds shut down. Businesses that rise above that line are potential investments for seasoned crowd investors, as achieving this means either the idea has impressed a lot of people or the people behind the idea have figured out their marketing.

There’s more in future, of course, Marom believes that it won’t be too long now until big firms begin to crowdfund ideas: “not just funding, but also crowd-sourcing new ideas and also, crowd-sourcing execution”.

Read the whole interview here.

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Crowdfunding site, Indiegogo just saw the Solar Roadways project become its most well-funded crowd fund campaign yet.

This means one day the road you drive may also generate solar electric power for your home. That’s the promise of Solar Roadways’ crowdfunding campaign. The crowdfunding round closed with $2.2 million funding last week — double what entrepreneur, Scott Brusaw, had asked for.

How it works

Solar Roadways replaces roads with solar panels which you can drive on. If they work it means highways will become power grids capable of powering the entire country. While there’s skepticism about the idea, Brusaw has raised a couple of million dollars from the crowd to help make it work.

He claims the glass in the modular pavers that shield the solar panels can handle the weight of any big truck. Eventually he wants the system to be generating power on highways, footpaths, driveways, playgrounds…

He has set Indiegogo records: the most popular campaign ever seen on the crowdfunding site, Solar Roadways attracted 48,000 backers from all across the US and 164 other countries.

Next step

The next step? Brusaw will test a prototype in Sandpoint, Idaho. He believes his system could eventually generate three times the electricity currently used in the US, while improving road safety and greenhouse gas emissions.

“At the end of the year we’ll have a finished product,” he told Yahoo News. “Once we’re convinced the final product works in a parking lot, we’ll try residential roads. Then, eventually, the fast lane of a highway.”

Solar Roadways was selected as a Finalist in the World Technology Award For Energy, presented last year in association with TIME, Fortune, CNN, and Science.

Crowdfunding future

Investors and entrepreneurs take note: the rush to invest in this idea suggests there’s huge demand for crowdfunding projects combining social good with environmental concerns.

Join the other 16 million people who watched the project video below.

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Sponsored by the City of London, Starting a Crowdfunding Business (£5/ticket) is aimed at those who already run or are planning to launch new crowdfunding platforms.

The event consists of a seminar with Governance, Risk and Compliance advisor, Jay Tikam, of Vedanvi Business and Risk Consultancy. Jay will explain how crowd funding businesses can become authorised with the Financial Conduct Authority, and how you can exploit that status once you achieve it.

From the event publicity:

“Crowdfunding and peer-to-peer lending is booming at an exponential rate. Recent research revealed that, globally, a new crowdfunding project is created every three minutes, with around 500 new projects created every day. The industry is currently doubling every sixty days!”

“Technology and funding, previously the biggest barriers to entry, are now no longer preventing entry of new players in this market place. The biggest obstacle now is getting through regulatory approval.”

Get your tickets at Eventbrite.

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In a gesture that recognises the challenge of funding new ventures the UK government offers two generous tax incentives designed to accelerate investment in sectors it recognises as vital to future economic prosperity.

• The Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS)
• The Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS)

The two schemes are slightly different, but in very (very) general terms they enable taxpayers to claim a rebate on the value of 30 percent of any share investments they might make in an early stage project recognised as having EIS or SEIS status.

A little more information about these two tax breaks:

EIS

EIS investors enjoy an initial 30% income tax saving and exemption from capital gains tax when the EIS shares are disposed of if the shares are held for a qualifying period.

It’s not quite a free for all – you can only claim EIS tax relief on a maximum of £1 million investment in any tax year (however a married couple can invest a million each). You can’t claim tax relief on any loans drawn to purchase the shares.

The company offering the EIS is limited to raising up to £5 million from that and two other schemes, the corporate venturing scheme and the venture capital trust scheme. The key limitation is that the company must operate within a “qualifying trade” and must also have fewer than 250 full-time employees.

The company you invest in must have a permanent establishment in the UK and must not have in excess of $15 million in gross assets before the share issue takes place.

Investors are locked into the scheme for a minimum of three years – they can’t exit the investment until that period has passed.

One more thing: “If shares are disposed of at a loss, the investor can elect that the amount of the loss, less Income Tax relief given, can be set against income of the year in which they were disposed or, on income of the previous year instead of being set off against any capital gains,” says Crowdcube.

“The purpose of Enterprise Investment Schemes is to recognise that unquoted trading companies can often face considerable difficulties in realising relatively small amounts of share capital. The new scheme is intended to provide a well-targeted means for some of those problems to be overcome,” said Michael Portillo, Chief Secretary to the Treasury when the scheme was launched in 1993

You should read HMRC’s guidance notes on EIS here.

SEIS

Under the SEIS, investors can invest up to £100,000 across a number of companies in a single tax year and don’t have to pay any Capital Gains Tax for gains they make on SEIS shares. Companies can raise no more than £150,000 in total via an SEIS investment.

However, in exchange for the investment investors cannot gain control of the company they invest in and aren’t permitted to take more than a 30% stake in that firm.

The benefit is good: investors can receive up to 50% tax relief in the tax year in which the investment is made, regardless of their marginal rate. In other words under SEIS you can claw back half of any qualifying investment made in terms of tax relief. There’s additional benefits, too, particularly when you cash in your investment — there’s an excellent PDF describing this in more detail here.

There’s some additional caveats to SEIS: The company invested in must be a UK firm with a permanent base in the country; it must also have under 25 employees and be no more than two years old and have assets of under £200,000. Finally, the company you want to take position in has to trade in an approved sector.

Chancellor George Osborne intends making some form of SEIS a permanent part of tax law (so it will always be available) later this year.

You should read HMRC’s SEIS guidance notes here.

There’s a little more detail to both these schemes, and you can’t claim them retrospectively — the company you take an investment in must have been accepted as a body covered by one of these schemes before you invest.

It’s also important UK tax payers recognise that the way these investments impact your own tax status will depend on your individual circumstances and may be subject to future change, so please speak to your tax adviser before you invest.

Photo credit: HM  Treasury

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