Kickstarter has left an indelible mark on the tabletop roleplaying game hobby. Starting in the early 2010s, the site opened the gates to RPG crowdfunding, which has gone from a curiosity to a first-move favorite all the way to literally more than 10% of the hobby by revenue. There is no single more high profile way to get your game attention, financing, and hopefully, success.
And…so what? We know how much money flows into crowdfunding, but how does money translate to influence over the hobby?
This is yet another article where I think about the disconnect between the TTRPG design world and what games are actually being played. Within every gaming group there’s a consideration of how games get out of the shelf and onto the table, and then in the hobby at large there’s a sinking feeling that it’s still all old games. Every table is different, though, including the many, many (many many many) of those that are exclusively playing 5th Edition D&D. But in thinking about how much Kickstarter drives our spending on RPGs, I clearly need to ask how much it drives our playing of RPGs.
This is going to be just one example, of course, out of many. That said, I think my own personal example ends up being resonant. When we look at how crowdfunded games have influenced what we play, we have to ask two questions. First, how many crowdfunded games do we actually play? Second, how many of those games made their way to the table because of their crowdfunding campaigns, as opposed to some other reason?
When I consider my primary gaming group, we’re a bit unique because of our length of tenure, our willingness to play new games, and our general diversity in both shorter and longer games. The shorter games are where many more crowdfunded games come up, and this is perhaps no surprise. Our one-shots which originated from crowdfunded games are multitudinous, starting with Dungeon World, campaigned in 2012, and most recently including FIST’s Mandelbrot Set, which was included in the FIST box set campaign from 2023. Especially recently, our crowdfunding scores are most likely to come out in short games where there’s something we want to try out. That said, when you look at our heavy hitters, crowdfunding was not how they came to prominence. FIST existed before Ultra Edition was crowdfunded, and DIE, arguably the group’s most affecting RPG of the last decade, had the comic behind it before the 2022 Kickstarter campaign grabbed our attention. Still, a lot of our short games did come straight from the Kickstarter presses, be that Zweihander back in 2017 or Cowboy Bebop which very quickly got pressed into the rotation after being released in 2023.
When it comes to our campaigns, though, the numbers are a bit more interesting. Looking at our online residency (technically from late 2009 to the present), the group has played 36 different campaigns, not including the two which are currently ongoing. Of those 36 campaigns, there are seven crowdfunded RPGs represented, roughly 20%. Is this number low? High? It’s hard to say. Our first ten campaigns had one crowdfunded game, the very last one, but most of those games were GURPS and Cyberpunk 2020, notably older games (circa 1985 and 1987, respectively). That game number ten, our first crowdfunded game, was a game run in Fate Core. The Fate Core Kickstarter campaign ran from the end of 2012 through the beginning of 2013, and our foray into Fate happened during the spring of 2014. Arguably, this is a decent (as well as the first) example of new game enthusiasm in part due to crowdfunding influencing what we played. There would be another five campaigns between that Fate game and the next crowdfunded game campaign, which used the first game I actually purchased via crowdfunding (Fate I bought in a game store after the fact). In the Fall of 2015 I ran a campaign using the Savage Worlds version of Interface Zero 2.0, a game I enthusiastically crowdfunded which fulfilled incredibly late. Even so, by that point in 2015 I at least had the PDFs (I do not remember exactly when I got the hardcopy) and we had a ball in that system, what with the honey badger hybrid and the full conversion crash test dummy and yes, the nun. What was interesting here was that I had backed the game on Kickstarter and then announced to the group that I wanted to run it once it had been released. This is something that happened incredibly rarely, though to be honest one of the reasons it happens so rarely for us is in part that the Interface Zero campaign had so many damn delays and it ended up mucking with my plans.
Interface Zero ended up being an interesting prologue for more actively including crowdfunded games in our campaign schedules. In the two years immediately following that we mostly did not, running a fair amount of FFG Star Wars mixed in with Dark Heresy and Apocalypse World. Apocalypse World has an interesting asterisk here; while I was running the first edition of the game (which came out in 2010 and was not crowdfunded), the second edition (which I had backed on Kickstarter) was fulfilling as we played, and while I didn’t incorporate the new edition I used one of the changes as an excuse to let one of the players use one of the extended playbooks (the Maestro’D) since it became a mainline playbook in 2e. In the summer of 2017, though, we had perhaps the most successful foray in bringing a Kickstarter game to the table.
Masks: A New Generation funded on Kickstarter during October of 2015. By early 2017, print copies were making their way towards backers, and somewhere roughly in that timeframe Seamus purchased a copy at PAX East. It was then that he planned to run a one-shot of the game at our Beach Weekend that year, not knowing that there would be a full-scale revolt demanding him extend the one-shot into a full campaign. This was, arguably, the first time a crowdfunded product made such a strong and direct impact on our group’s gaming. It also marked another time where the game came to the table shortly after being crowdfunded, notable both because the game was new and its crowdfunding success was arguably a reason it got purchased. Fate Core fell into this category, and others would later as well.
There were a few other games which were crowdfunded, but weren’t played directly from the crowdfunding or due to any crowdfunding hype. Torchbearer I brought to the group years after its 2013 crowdfunding, in part due to the phenomenal Shut Up and Sit Down review and in part due to my love of Burning Wheel. We played Eclipse Phase 2e in 2020, about three years after the crowdfunding, but I had introduced the group to Eclipse Phase 1e in 2009 and it had never made it to the table in the intervening years. We played a game of The Veil, which I purchased because it was PbtA and Cyberpunk while having missed the crowdfunding entirely (I instead purchased my copy from IPR, much like Seamus did with Masks). And, of course, our current games are both crowdfunded, Wildsea and Urban Shadows 2e, but they were brought to the group after seeing play in other venues first.
There are three basic categories we need to talk about here. First, of course, are the games which never touched crowdfunding. For our group it was GURPS, Cyberpunk, FFG Star Wars and Genesys, Exalted, Shadowrun, Dark Heresy, L5R, D&D, and a handful of others. This is in part because my group is all hurling towards their 40s, but also because the biggest mainline games by sales either aren’t crowdfunded or are only partly crowdfunded. Some of these titles have shifted into crowdfunding, like Exalted, while others never will, like Cyberpunk and D&D. As long as older properties are a mainstay, though, there will be plenty of games that simply aren’t in the crowdfunding ecosystem.
The second category are crowdfunded games that we played irrespective of the crowdfunding campaign. The Veil and Fate Core, which I purchased after their Kickstarter campaigns were over, are good examples. Eclipse Phase, which I did crowdfund but which had a history with us dating back to the earlier edition, is another, and Masks, purchased at a con just as copies were becoming available after initial fulfillment, is yet another. This also extends to some of our one-shot games like Mothership, which I backed on Kickstarter because I had seen the earlier edition around and knew it was awesome already. It’s important to consider games like this separately because as we know there isn’t really a guarantee of life after a crowdfunding campaign. When you see groups like mine glom onto games well after the crowdfunding is past, we’re generally talking about high-profile, well-financed, and arguably popular games. Since my examples here are Mothership, Masks, and Fate Core, I tend to believe my group reflects this trend fairly well.
The third group are those crowdfunded games that actually made it to the table because of their crowdfunding. This ends up being a fairly small category for us, including both Interface Zero 2.0 and Twilight:2000. It’s worth noting here that I actually thought Seamus had backed Masks on Kickstarter and found out that wasn’t the case much later; if anything that shows the importance of designers leveraging their Kickstarter hype to make a product successful instead of assuming that successful fulfillment means they’re now finished. Overall, though, we don’t generally bring games straight from fulfillment to the table, and that is likely the result of a decade or more of experience where campaigns don’t fulfill on time (like Interface Zero) or the game doesn’t match your expectations (games which, unsurprisingly, we never ended up playing in campaign format).
When we look across the games we’ve played over the last 15+ years, the crowdfunded entries are a small portion but generally represent themselves well. What’s perhaps a more important comparison is how many crowdfunded games make it to the table out of what we back. I can’t speak for Seamus, so the group view is necessarily incomplete. However. I have backed 196 projects that have successfully funded. 24 of those have not fulfilled (the majority of those because I backed them in the last 9-12 months and just aren’t done yet, but some of those are dud projects). There were also 17 projects which weren’t RPGs (including indie film, bike accessories, and video games). So out of the remaining 155 projects, 26 have made it to the table in one form or another. That’s roughly ⅙ of the RPGs I backed. Is that a good number? A bad number? I’m not sure. To be honest, it’s actually a little higher than I was expecting, but that’s ultimately a good thing…isn’t it?
This analysis, as good analyses often do, painted a more moderate picture of my crowdfunding habit than I expected. Successfully playing ⅙ of all the games I crowdfunded was more than I thought, even if that only implies my mental bar was very low. At the same time, crowdfunding produced a number of games that completely changed my perspective on gaming; Masks was obviously one of them but so was DIE and so was Fate Core. And even if crowdfunding didn’t bring them to me, per se, Torchbearer and Mothership are where they are because of crowdfunding.
There’s also the other side of this, that we don’t necessarily have a huge amount of experience following games before they move to crowdfunding, and therefore see what we consider gems fall by the wayside. But the issue here is one of volume. There is a balance between the fact that any one group could likely keep going for the rest of their natural lives with 1-6 games, and the fact that crowdfunding is still the easiest and honestly safest point to enter the new game floodgates to find wild and revelatory experiences. As much as I kind of wanted to at the outset, I can’t honestly say that you can discount crowdfunding. That said, if you are looking at a perhaps 15-20% hit rate of games you’ll play at all, and a much lower rate of games that change your life, there’s an open question of how much that’s worth to you. From my perspective, though, it’s probably the right move to keep an eye on crowdfunding. I couldn’t possibly tell you which game is going to make the whole thing worth it, but as I look back on my own experiences, I’m pretty confident that there’s at least one new thing out there that will completely change how you think about gaming. With that in mind, I’d say it’s best to have a keen eye and place a large spread of relatively small bets. Happy hunting.
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