Kickstarter is a crowdfunding platform that aims to fund projects through donations in exchange for a reward. Currently, as much as 40% of all projects on the platform belong to the category of tabletop games. The platform is no longer only used by start-ups and creative individuals who want to realize their idea, but also by large publishers that use Kickstarter as a pre-order store. The master's thesis examines the participatory culture and collaborative economy on Kickstarter and explores the reasons for such a transformation. The purpose of the empirical part of the assignment is to analyse the infrastructure of the platform and find out its affordances, and to obtain answers from both regular backers and representatives of publishing houses through semi-structured interviews, which will reveal the reasons for using the platform and the importance of user participation. The research showed that the participatory culture on Kickstarter is a key element for the transformation of the entire industry, and it is closely related to the affordances of the platform. User participation is extremely important for all supporters who want to communicate and share their opinion, and at the same time it improves the platform's algorithms, which brings creators more traffic and organic marketing.
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