Kickstarter Saw Huge Growth For Tabletop Games In 2019, And A Minor Increase For Video Games

Crowdfunding giant Kickstarter had its best year ever for games related projects in 2019, earning $208,365,473 across 7043 projects. The majority of growth came from tabletop games, although digital games also saw a slight bump.

This information comes via a blog post on Ico Partners by CEO Thomas Bidaux, who performs an annual audit on how games perform on Kickstarter. 2019 was the first year in the company’s history that more games projects were funded than unfunded–3731 projects made their funding targets, while 3312 did not.

“The number of funded projects is growing faster than the number of projects submitted to the platform, meaning the percentage of projects that get funded is also going up,” Bidaux wrote. With the quality of the campaigns improving, this is quite an impressive trend.”

Tabletop games saw 2712 projects successfully funded, earning $176,380,815–up from 3692/$166,338,571 the previous year. Aside from a slight drop in earnings in 2014, both figures have trended upwards every year since 2011. 67% of tabletop projects reached their funding goals in 2019, and 68 projects brought in over $500,000.

For video games, the bump was smaller. They earned a total of $16,287,257–up from 2018’s $15,862,307, but a far cry from the $47,679,833 projects earned in 2013. 380 projects were funded, and 1048 were not, which is similar to the split in 2018 (352 funded, 1149 unfunded).

Six projects earned over $500,000 (up from five in 2018), and 19 earned between $100,000 and $500,000 (down from 25). According to Gamesindustry.biz, the six games to earn over $500,000 in crowdfunding during 2019 were Subverse, Monster Prom 2: Holiday Season, R-Type Final 2, Day of Dragons, and Everspace 2.

Part of this slow growth might have to do with alternate funding platforms available–Chorus, for instance, was funded on Fig. The biggest crowdfunding success for a game on Kickstarter remains Shenmue 3, which earned $6.3 million on the service.