Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for December! Well, folks, we made it. It’s nearly the end of 2023, and the holiday season is now upon us. It’s time to look back on the year, look forward to the next, and light lights to guard against the darkness of winter.

It’s also time for statistics! This year as part of Crowdfunding Carnival, I went into the archives and did retrospectives of the Kickstarter Wonk articles from 2018, the start of the series. With over 100 campaigns reviewed, I was able to collect some interesting data and reflect on the nature of RPG Kickstarters based both on trends within the sample as well as some reflection on what was included in my sample and what was not. While I don’t think anything I learned is particularly earth-shattering, it’s always nice to get a little quantitative nugget among the highly qualitative world of writing about games.

First, though, let’s talk about what’s campaigning now. The holiday season is when you want to finish, not start your campaigns, but there are at least a few that are worth highlighting.

Campaigns of Note

December is often a thin time for Kickstarter campaigns; an ideal timeline would be to ‘fulfill’ around or before December so that you can go on sale in time for the holidays. In recent years this has been further emphasized by the late November/early December timing of PAX Unplugged, now one of the largest tabletop events on the calendar albeit still number three behind GenCon and Origins. This structuralized timing is also something which emphasizes a trend (which I discuss below) of professional Kickstarter campaigns absorbing more and more of the revenue in the space, leaving true indie campaigns squeezed between high-dollar efforts from the likes of Kobold Press and Free League and drop shipped, low-effort dross in the form of dice, minis, and other accessories of questionable utility.

Either way. Currently we have three campaigns that are highly worth checking out: First, Gallant Knight Games is campaigning Tiny Cyberpunk, another addition to the TinyD6 library. In some ways I’m surprised this particular angle has taken so long for the Gallant Knight crew, but it’ll serve as another addition to the game’s expanding library. Second we have Chris McDowall’s Mythic Bastionland. Whereas Electric Bastionland comes after Into the Odd in the timeline Mythic Bastionland comes before, and game has you roll up one of many different knights (as opposed to a failed career like the previous game) and go on quests, including ultimately questing for the city of Bastion itself. Being a fan of Electric Bastionland makes it pretty easy to recommend this one, and I’ve personally pledged to it as well.

Speaking of Free League, their newest campaign opened just yesterday. The Electric State follows Tales from the Loop and Things from the Flood as the next project based on the work of artist Simon Stahlenhag, but here the futurism is tempered with distinctly apocalyptic elements. The Electric State has a similar design roster to Tales from the Loop and is also using Free League’s Year Zero Engine. I’m not sure there will be any surprises here, but I am looking forward to another view of the apocalypse from the stewards of both Twilight:2000 and Mutant.

Similar to Kickstarter there’s not too much action across the second-tier crowdfunding platforms, especially not in the standalone new game category. That said it is worth at least noting a couple supplements that came up. Jenga Tower romance game Star Crossed is campaigning an expansion, Love Letters, which provides new characters, settings, and alternate modes of play. If you have Star Crossed you’ll know that generating the premise at the beginning can be open-ended to an intimidating degree, so Love Letters could be a great supplement to help the game see more play. Onyx Path is continuing their shift to IndieGoGo with another Exalted supplement, Abyssals. This is worth noting as a very large campaign for a non-Kickstarter platform, and also a clear indication that I do not understand the Exalted supplement strategy if this is still being developed after Essence, which was supposed to clean up this whole thing. Still, it’s a solid way to get some revenue from the 1-2000 people still playing Exalted 3E.

Five Year Retrospective Wash-Up

As it’s December, there’s now an entire year of retrospective from 2018. December of 2018 was a solidly decent crop, though there was one that failed to fund and one that managed to get all the way to fulfillment successfully despite only having 32 backers. Two standouts in terms of keeping up some attention and sales after their campaigns were Nibiru and Never Tell Me The Odds; Mutant:Elysium has also done well but it’s a Free League game so we don’t have to feign surprise on that one.

When you look at the year in total, though, it begins to tell some interesting stories about Kickstarters, running them, and succeeding at them. Through this whole year I’ve been screening each Kickstarter Wonk from 2018 and placing each game in a spreadsheet. There are 113 campaigns in total from 12 articles (I know I forgot to include one in an article earlier this year but I’ve done the backend analysis for all 12). For each campaign I tracked four binary properties. First, did the campaign fund successfully? Second, if it funded successfully, has it fulfilled successfully? Third, if it fulfilled successfully, did it sell successfully after the campaign? This can be hard to get data for, but I generally counted a game as successful if it had either a ‘Gold’ rating on DriveThruRPG (500+ sales), an award nomination of some repute, or other qualitative evidence that the game was still for sale, selling well, and otherwise supported on a different sales platform. As it turns out, the vast majority of games that have a Kickstarter end up on DriveThruRPG, and the vast majority of Kickstarter games that aren’t on DriveThruRPG are sitting essentially unregarded on an itch page or random “publisher” website. The exceptions to these were fairly obvious. Finally, regardless of all the other variables, was the campaign from a major publisher? This is also qualitative but for the 2018 crop of games, there weren’t too many edge cases. The smallest publisher I called ‘major’ in this collection was Bully Pulpit Games, but in all cases the company behind these Kickstarters was recognized, had an existing backlog of products, and more cash flow than the indie creators that made up the bulk of the campaigns.

The first stat of note is that 87.6% of campaigns covered in 2018 were funded. This is the one stat where my personal filter has an obvious impact; the campaigns most likely to fail were ones that also made me go ‘ugh’ and skip them, thereby removing them from this sample. Of the campaigns that I did cover that failed to fund, I’d say most were due to a lack of marketing; one thing I realized in later years is that if you have to read the campaign to fully know what you’re getting into, that campaign will have a much tougher time. The next core stat is that 78.8% of campaigns were delivered, but the more impactful way to read this is that 8.8% of campaigns either failed after funding or ghosted. Now, there were a few of the campaigns in this category that were still getting updates and progress reports after five years. While those campaigns did not technically ghost, I think from any reasonable performance management standpoint they still technically failed.

The final core stat is that 34.5% of projects generated enough sales to be considered successful after the campaign. Here’s where it gets interesting, though. Only about 24% of actual indie projects hit this milestone, but 94% of projects from major publishers did. When you consider that the 500 sale milestone is equivalent to about $7000 in additional revenue (after DriveThru’s cut), this means that the vast majority of designers will make much more money just starting another Kickstarter than attempting to market or support their games (some designers choose to Kickstart supplements to their games, but from an audience fragmentation perspective this is almost always a doomed strategy). What’s worse is that the vast majority of the non-major ‘successful’ games are from repeat designers, outfits like Nerdburger Games and Gallant Knight Games which aren’t big but have experience in both marketing and game design which allow them to succeed. Both the ‘Kickstarter Thud’ and the ‘Kickstarter Addiction’ phenomena are quite plainly explained through the data: It’s easier to fund than it is to succeed afterwards, and the easiest path to eventually reach that long-term success is through funding more campaigns.

I’m immensely curious to see how these trends play out over the years. Are the basic proportions consistent, or do they change? If they do change, is performance getting better, or worse? Luckily, I have much more data to call on here, with another five years of crowdfunding roundups to analyze (and counting). The five-year retrospective is now going to be a permanent part of Crowdfunding Carnival; I’ve had a lot of fun looking back through the archives and doing some statistics, and there’s nothing stopping me from doing more. 2019 is going to be interesting; that’s the first year of ZineQuest, after all. I’ll figure out what I’m going to do about cracking that particular nut a little closer to February. No matter what I decide, though, I’m sure there will be more insights to be gleaned as we keep on moving through the past with these retrospectives.

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All in all, 2023 was a good year. Crowdfunding Carnival is going to continue looking into the past as well as the future, and hopefully everything only gets more interesting as there’s more data. This also means I’ve now been surveying RPG crowdfunding for six whole years! It’s always a little wild to look back on what you’ve done, but I’m not stopping any time soon. Happy Holidays to all of you and your families; I can’t wait to show you more games-to-be when we return in January for another Crowdfunding Carnival!

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