Welcome to the usual review of the performance of games on Kickstarter for the past year. This post contains number shared originally at my Pocket Gamer Connect London talk on the topic, including the latest bets practices of successful campaigns.
Tabletop Games in 2021
2021 was yet again a year net growth for tabletop games on Kickstarter, both in raw numbers of projects funded, but also in the total amount of money raised by the projects.
If the year-on-year growth for the amount of money raised is less than in 2020 (+33% in 2020 and +13% in 2021), the year-on-year growth in the total number of projects getting funded is closer (+17% in 2020 and +11% in 2021) and still pretty impressive for an industry very much qualified as niche.
Many professionals I have talked took are very afraid of a bubble, and the platform becoming less reliable to finance their projects, but 2021 is not showing this sort of signs.
With a number of large projects having launched on Kickstarter competing platform Gamefound, tabletop games and crowdfunding are on track to keep their very heathy relationship.
Looking at the size of the projects overall, the amount of money raised by each projects tiers, is sensibly the same as in 2020 — and the same is true for total number of funded projects in each tier who grew in the same proportion.
This shows a very steady growth from one year to another — and this is also the first year that Kickstarter saw the total number of tabletop projects raising more than $500,000 in a year pass the 100 mark (101 projects exactly), an impressive number!
Video Games & Kickstarter
The video games category keeps seeing very stable numbers, with a slightly lower amount of money raised in total.
However, it has broken a record number of funded projects with 441 video games meeting their financial goal in 2021. This is the second year in a row that the video games category breaks its own record for funded projects, and only the third time we see more than 400 projects getting funded in a year.
The most remarkable trend in 2021, is the total number of projects raising between $100k and $500k being the highest ever (51 projects, beating the previous record year, 2014). This is the tier raising the most money in 2021, with fewer projects in the $500k tier than in 2020.
With fewer “hits”, last year’s numbers are showing more than an excellent stability for the video game category, but a slight growth. The trend is not significant enough that we can expect Kickstarter to have the prominence it had in the 2012–2015 period, but with more video projects than ever before meeting their goals, it makes Kickstarter a reliable platform to crowdfund the right video game projects.
Conclusion
Last year was yet another good year for games on Kickstarter. A continued overall growth for tabletop games, despite the emergence of a serious competitor, and a growth in mid size projects for video games.
2022 will be a key year though. Kickstarter’s announcement it is developing a “protocol” on the blockchain has been met by serious pushback from creators and backers alike, with the game ecosystem being very vocal about their discontent. This is happening right as Gamefound is working towards opening their platform beyond the few curated projects it has launched so far.
Regardless of where the projects get funded, the past trend show that games, both on tabletop and on digital platforms, have a strong future with crowdfunding still.
