Kickstarter valiantly declared 2012 to be “The Year of the Game.” The crowdfunding platform has pulled in well over $50 million for game related projects this year alone. Major developers like Obsidian have taken to the platform to help fund Project Eternity, a new RPG built for gamers by gamers. With Kickstarter seeing so much success, is there room for another game crowdfunding platform?

The folks at Gambitious obviously think so. They have launched a new platform today with a tagline of “Crowdfunding for games turns pro.” It’s amazingly similar to Kickstarter, but with some unique advantages that set it apart. For starters, it differentiates between investors, backers, pledgers and followers. That difference is what makes Gambitious more ambitious than other crowdfunding platforms.

Welcome to Gambitious, The Professional Crowdfunding for the Videogame Industry from Gambitious Crowdfunding on Vimeo.

The main difference is the investor gains equity in the project they have chosen to fund, whereas the pledger is somebody who contributes funds in exchange for a perk. Backers can be either/or, but they can also be both. In fact, Gambitious encourages people to give money through both avenues so they can gain perks, but also have equity in case the game takes off to be a success.

Gambitious also separates itself from Kickstarter by being based in The Netherlands. One of the many problems with Kickstarter is that Europeans can’t contribute through the site. They would normally have to pledge money through a separate PayPal account. Gambitious will allow projects and funding to come from the U.S. in the coming year after they work through some legal hurdles.

There are a number of projects already featured on Gambitious at launch. Such titles include a new Mushroom Men title and a new project from Duke Nukem creators, 3D Realms.

It will be interesting to see if gamers flock to Gambitious to fund games. Kickstarter is already synonymous with gamers and developers as the crowdfunding site to be on. It will take some serious marketing to get developers to jump ship.

[h/t: GameIndustry.biz]