Tabletop Kickstarter campaigns made ten times the amount raised by video games in 2018

2018 was another strong year for tabletop games on Kickstarter, as the number of projects making more than half a million dollars doubled compared to 2017.

That’s one of the takeaways from a new report by analyst firm ICO Partners looking at how the crowdfunding site fared last year.

As a whole, the games category – which includes both tabletop projects and video games – made $192m in 2018. That’s almost $30m up on 2017’s already impressive figure of $163m for successful games campaigns, and saw games become responsible for more than a third of the $565m raised across the whole of Kickstarter. ICO notes that games is the “only main category growing” on Kickstarter based on its data.

Tabletop games were far and away the most successful type of game crowdfunded on Kickstarter, raking in $165m compared to $137m in 2017. That’s around a 20% increase year on year, and means that tabletop projects alone make up almost 30% of all the money raised on Kickstarter – up from an estimate in the middle of last year that they represented a quarter of the entire platform.

That number made tabletop projects around ten times bigger than video games on Kickstarter last year, which raised just shy of $16m, a small drop from more than $17m in 2017.

There were more tabletop campaigns than ever before last year, with nearly 3,700 projects launching on Kickstarter during 2018 – over half the 6,816 projects launched across all game types. Of those, more than 63% – 2,336 – were funded successfully, a very slight jump from the 61% of tabletop projects funded in 2017 and a notable bit higher than the 48% of games as a whole that successfully hit their target last year. As a whole, the number of games projects funded went up by 10%.

Again, tabletop projects significantly outweighed video games, with only 352 video game projects successfully funded in 2018 – less than a quarter of the 1,501 launched, a 15% drop year on year.

There aren’t just more tabletop projects getting funded; they’re also making more money. One particularly impressive stat is that the number of tabletop games that raised over half a million dollars doubled in 2018, from 34 to 68. That doesn’t mean that smaller games are being left behind, though – the report suggests that the number of successful tabletop projects grew consistently across all levels of funding, from under $10,000 to over $500,000.

While tabletop’s booming success on Kickstarter for the last few years will no doubt leave some asking when the bubble will eventually burst, ICO analyst Thomas Bidaux is more optimistic.

“Hard to say if the ecosystem can sustain this growth another year,” he says. “I would expect it to stabilise.”