2017 was the biggest year yet for games on Kickstarter

After a record-breaking 12 months for Kickstarter in 2016, tabletop games continued to flourish on the crowdfunding site last year.

2017 got off to a strong start thanks to epic dungeon crawler Kingdom Death: Monster 1.5, which first overtook previous record-breaker Dark Souls: The Board Game to become the most-funded board game ever launched through the platform, before toppling Exploding Kittens in early January to claim the crown for the biggest tabletop Kickstarter of all time with a truly staggering $12.4 million in pledges.

It was followed by Eric Lang’s much-anticipated follow-up to Blood Rage, Rising Sun, which added over $4 million to the pot, and the combined expansion and reprint campaign for The 7th Continent towards the end of the year, which brought in another $7 million.

Kickstarter’s head of games Luke Crane tweeted that the combined games category – which includes both tabletop and video – saw more successfully funded projects than ever before, with 2,997 achieving their goal out of the 7,033 launched. In 2016, 2,595 projects were successful.

What’s more, the total amount of money made by funded campaigns increased last year by 29% compared to 2016, raking in a huge $163 million against the previous year’s $126.7 million.

Although Kickstarter is yet to break down the stats into tabletop and video game specifics, Crane revealed that of the 726,000 backers of successful games projects, 528,000 (or around 73%) supported tabletop campaigns – providing some insight into the split between analogue and digital gaming on the site.

In early August last year, analyst ICO Partners estimated that tabletop projects had been responsible for almost a quarter of all the money made on Kickstarter as a whole during first six months of 2017, making close to $70 million in just the first half of the year.

This followed the news from Kickstarter in March that over 6,000 tabletop projects and 10,000 games had been crowdfunded successfully through the site, with $360 million raised by tabletop campaigns to date by the platform – a figure that is undoubtedly much bigger now.